A few weeks ago, I expressed a concern about Burt Rutan’s X-Prize attempt, in which I wrote:

Burt Rutan may end up losing the X-Prize because he’s not doing what’s necessary in order to be able to legally fly by the end of next year, regardless of the technical readiness of his vehicle.

Now, from Aerospace Daily:

Rutan, founder of Scaled Composites, said the vehicles really are commercial aircraft and not subject to the stricter regulatory regime of space vehicles, such as booster rockets and the space shuttle.

The FAA office has asked Rutan to defend the safety characteristics of the White Knight launch vehicle and the Space Ship One, he said, a request he has refused. The FAA?s inquiries are not likely to postpone Rutan?s planned flight test schedule, he said, but added, ?it?s possible they will.?

If negotiations fail, Rutan said, he will move outside the FAA?s jurisdiction by obtaining a U.S. Air Force contract. The FAA?s regulatory authority does not
extend to military vehicles.

Rutan ruled out the possibility of moving his program outside of the U.S. to avoid the FAA?s spaceflight regulations. ?I?m geared to do my program at Mojave,? a commercial airport in California where the Scaled Composites program is based, he said.

Advantage, Transterrestrial!

Though I’m saddened to see my prediction come true.

Of course, if this quote is accurate, Burt doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t know what he means by “booster rockets,” but the Shuttle is not subject to any regulatory regime–it’s run by NASA. And the regime actually isn’t stricter–it’s just different (and it’s utterly unfamiliar to him). In many ways, it’s less strict, at least for commercial use, because it doesn’t require vehicle certification (an issue with whose problems no one is more familiar than Burt).

What he’s trying to do is avoid having to get a launch license, and because he’s already decided not to get one, it’s probably already too late for him to do so, or will be soon, because it’s not a process that can occur overnight.

The email correspondent who sent me this information, and is following these issues closely, characterized Burt as a “bull in a china shop.”

He’s going to set off an intra-agency dispute at the FAA, and then widen it to one between the FAA and the Air Force, if he insists on going that route. If I were the X-Prize committee, I’d be thinking really hard about slapping this down before it turns into a nasty mess, with terrible regulatory precedents.

[Update at 3:11 PM PDT]

I should add that moving off shore wouldn’t help him either, unless he renounces his citizenship as well. The US position is that it is regulatorily responsible for launch activities of US entities, regardless of their location on the planet, because of liability provisions of the Outer Space Treaty (yet another reason to get out of it).

[Friday morning update]

Just to clarify questions asked in the comments section, the EZ-Rocket can fly on an experimental aircraft certificate–it doesn’t go in, or even near, space. Here are the current FAA definitions (only recently announced) of suborbital vehicles and trajectories, which will require a launch license of some type.

Suborbital rocket: a rocket-propelled vehicle intended for flight on a suborbital trajectory whose thrust is greater than its lift for the majority of the powered portion of its flight.

Suborbital trajectory: the intentional flight path of a launch vehicle, reentry vehicle, or any portion thereof, whose vacuum instantaneous impact point does not leave the surface of the Earth.

Note that altitude is not a factor in the definition.

And I’ve linked it before, but Jeff Foust has a good overview of the current regulatory situation for suborbital here. This is pending any changes in legislation that may appear this year.

For those three readers I have who don’t read Instapundit, my Fox column is up. It’s a more genteel response to Mr. O’Reilly than my previous one, and it’s all-new, now with 38% less snark!

I also apologize to John Pike for accusing him of being a physicist.

Kevin Murphy, both in the comments section to this post, and at his blog, makes an interesting point about the potential “equal time on the web” provision being considered in the EU.

Who gets equal time after satire? Here, the form would say first amendment supporters, yet the meaning would say Bill O’Reilly and second amendment suppressors. Only the lawyers will profit from such a requirement.

Yup, which is just one more absurdity of the notion. Like Kevin, I suspect that they haven’t even thought about that problem.

Mark Steyn discourses on ongoing anti-Americanism masquerading as concern for Iraq. As always, he gets in a few delicious zingers.

After I wrote about my trip to Iraq in the Sunday Telegraph and its sister papers, I received quite a few emails from US troops in the country, the gist of which was summed up by one guy with a civil affairs unit near Baghdad: ?I?m glad to hear somebody report what?s really going on …the fact that there isn?t anything going on.? I saw no anarchy, no significant anti-US hostility, and no hospitals at anything like capacity. In other words, I was unable to find Will Day?s Iraq. I don?t honestly think it exists outside his head: as Dinah Washington once sang, ?Water difference a Day makes?; he has miraculously transformed Iraqi water into whine.

Mark Steyn discourses on ongoing anti-Americanism masquerading as concern for Iraq. As always, he gets in a few delicious zingers.

After I wrote about my trip to Iraq in the Sunday Telegraph and its sister papers, I received quite a few emails from US troops in the country, the gist of which was summed up by one guy with a civil affairs unit near Baghdad: ?I?m glad to hear somebody report what?s really going on …the fact that there isn?t anything going on.? I saw no anarchy, no significant anti-US hostility, and no hospitals at anything like capacity. In other words, I was unable to find Will Day?s Iraq. I don?t honestly think it exists outside his head: as Dinah Washington once sang, ?Water difference a Day makes?; he has miraculously transformed Iraqi water into whine.

Mark Steyn discourses on ongoing anti-Americanism masquerading as concern for Iraq. As always, he gets in a few delicious zingers.

After I wrote about my trip to Iraq in the Sunday Telegraph and its sister papers, I received quite a few emails from US troops in the country, the gist of which was summed up by one guy with a civil affairs unit near Baghdad: ?I?m glad to hear somebody report what?s really going on …the fact that there isn?t anything going on.? I saw no anarchy, no significant anti-US hostility, and no hospitals at anything like capacity. In other words, I was unable to find Will Day?s Iraq. I don?t honestly think it exists outside his head: as Dinah Washington once sang, ?Water difference a Day makes?; he has miraculously transformed Iraqi water into whine.

Here’s an interesting post from The Corner.

You know, not that I’m a conservative, but I’ve always disagreed with Keynes because, well, he was a collectivist, and his nostrums always seemed transparently wrong to me.

I never knew, until this day, that he was gay.

And I don’t care.

And I think that this is further proof that, whatever his education and reputation in economics, Paul Krugman is a loon.

[Note: this is a more polished version of an earlier post. I’ve added in a lot of good thoughts based on the comments there, and wish to thank all of the contributers.]

I often disagree with Bill O’Reilly, but I want to defend him.

A lot of smart people are bashing him on line,

particularly in the blogosphere, but I think that this just proves his point. I think that he’s spot on with this erudite and well-reasoned editorial. This “Internet” is just too powerful.

When the Founders wrote the First Amendment, they could never have conceived a technology that would allow anyone to publish anything at any time, at almost no cost, and have it readable by millions instantaneously.

In fact, inspired by this work, I’m working on a book, tentatively titled “Publishing America: Origins Of The Free-Speech Myth,” in which my thesis is that very few people had access to printing presses in colonial times, and this notion of a long American tradition of a free press and individual freedom of expression is simply propaganda of First Amendment extremists. I’ve painstakingly gone over old probate inventories, and can show statistically that very few homes traditionally had means of printing and, such few as there were, they had mostly fallen into such a state of disrepair as to be useless.

Unfortunately, my pet iguana ate all of my notes, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. I’m sure the print nuts will employ their usual ad hominem tactics, and call me a fraud.

Anyway, it’s one thing to have free speech when the most effective means of communicating ideas is with a printing press that few can afford, and has to have the type carefully set by hand, and they have to be printed on expensive paper, and transported no faster than a horse can run, and distributed by walking door to door.

Such a laborious and expensive process as colonial-era printing ensured that potentially dangerous ideas were more thought out, and well edited, and could usually be easily traced to their author. So, given that the investment in publishing was so high, it made it much more likely that only responsible people would be publishing things, and that you wouldn’t have wackos running around spewing crazy or confused, even false or misinformed notions at innocent and naive passers by.

In that environment, it made perfect sense to grant an individual right to print things (to bear presses, as it were), because there was little danger of it getting out of hand.

But surely the Founders never intended for every single citizen to be able to exercise such a right–in their wisdom, they would have known it would lead to chaos and unfettered thought. They couldn’t possibly have imagined the rapid-fire distribution of dangerous ideas made possible by twenty-first-century technology. Why, some people might have even put forth the absurd notion that free speech is the right of everyone.

Had they actually anticipated the possibility that the cost of publishing could drop so dramatically, they would surely have made the First Amendment a much more explicitly collective right (like the Second), in which people would only have a right to free speech in a well-regulated state newspaper.

Let’s be reasonable–of course it’s fine to let people have typewriters, and copiers, as long as they don’t have a paper magazine of more than a quarter-ream capacity, and can’t print more than two pages per minute in high-density color. There are legitimate uses for such things–printing up book reports for school, making PTA meeting notices and party invitations, and the like. We respect the rights of those who wish to indulge in such innocuous, if pointless activities, long a part of the American cultural tradition (though it would certainly make sense to register such devices, in case they’re stolen, or lest they’re used to express some untoward or scandalous thought).

Of course, we do need to outlaw the cheap Sunday-night specials, old manual machines still available in pawn shops, with sticky keys, that cause ink stains, and from which a large number of late term papers are produced by the criminal procrastinating class during the witching hours. But really, folks, chill–no one wants to take away your typewriters.

But the Founders would realize also, just as Bill O’Reilly and I do today, that no one, other than the police and politicians, needs the kind of “idea assault” publishing capability offered by word processors, blogging software, and even fifteen-page-per-minute ink-jet printers, which really have no legitimate use–they only propagate calumny and wrong-headed notions, tragically damaging innocent celebrities’ egos, sometimes permanently.

This past weekend, just to demonstrate how easy it is to lay hands on such dangerous equipment, I exploited the notorious “computer show loophole,” and went out to the big show in Pomona, California. There, I saw entire halls filled with purveyors of high-speed idea processors, rapid-fire printers, and even modems capable of transmitting thoughts at frightening rates, up to gigabytes per second. For only $4.99, with not so much as an ID requirement, let alone a background check, I was able to purchase an “assault keyboard,” with several internet hotkeys. It was fully automatic–holding down any key would result in a torrent of characters being spit out, hundreds per minute. I even saw teenaged children buying them.

Yet, when people propose sensible regulations over this, we hear hysterical cries about “freedom of expression,” and “from my cold, dead fingers.” But surely the far-fringe First Amendment absolutists are misreading it–there is a hint of a shadow of an umbra of a penumbra in there, easily accessed by referencing the Second Amendment. Bearing this in mind, it is more properly read with the following implicit preface: “A well-regulated press being necessary for the security of the State and self-important talk-show hosts, Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…”

Clearly, viewed in the light of that implicit purpose clause, these were not intended to be individual rights, any more than they were in the Second Amendment, because obviously, the Founders wouldn’t have meant one thing by the words “the right of the people” in the one case, and a different thing in the other, particularly in two adjacent amendments.

Accordingly it is equally clear that we need to implement what would obviously have been the Founders’ intent had they foreseen the Internet, and immediately pass some laws to get this thing under control. Let’s do it for the children.

Particularly Bill O’Reilly.

Samizdatan David Carr has kicked off a long thread on the taxonomy of libertarians, by complaining about the new trend for collectivists to hijack the term.

I’m watching Tim Burton’s version of “Planet of the Apes” on HBO.

Is it just me, or does Ari, Helena Bonham Carter’s character (an apparent derivative of Dr. Zira from the original, played by Kim Hunter), look a lot like Michael Jackson?

Just asking…