RIP HR 3752. Or not?

The last couple of days have been a roller coaster, to put it mildly. On Tuesday, as reported here, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said publicly that HR 3752 was not dead and, in fact, a final deal was likely by the end of the day Wednesday. However, things apparently took a turn for the worse later in the day, and by Wednesday morning there was growing skepticism that a deal could be reached. On Wednesday afternoon the House Science Committee confirmed the worst in a press release: HR 3752 had been killed by a House committee that stepped into the negotiations on the bill at the last minute.

What happened? According to the press release and other sources, House and Senate negotiators, working on the bill for weeks, had reached a compromise on the bill last Friday. A copy of the legislation released by the House Science Committee shows that the language that appeared to elevate the safety of passengers to the same level of the uninvolved public—provisions that alarmed the industry in early October—were now gone, replaced by wording that called for evolving safety regulations as the industry matured.

However, the House Transportation Committee—which reviewed HR 3752 when it passed the House in March but “no concerns about the substance of the bill”, according to the science committee—changed its mind this week, expressing concerns about both the original bill and the deal reached on Friday. That committee apparently wants to start over next year with new hearings, and would presumably block any attempt to pass the legislation in the House during the remainder of this brief lame-duck session.

By most accounts, the bill is dead, and backers will have to start over next year in the new Congress. “I hope we will be able to revive the bill next year,” Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), chair of the House Science Committee, said in a press release. “But everyone should understand that the final deal was a delicate, carefully calibrated compromise on precisely how much regulation was appropriate, and when. Those kinds of carefully tuned instruments tend to decay pretty rapidly over time.”

But is the bill really dead? In an email Wednesday afternoon, Charles Lurio, a consultant and activist involved in commercial space activities, said that sources directly involved with the negotiations have claimed that the bill is not dead yet. Lurio did not elaborate, but presumably the focus of efforts is now to lift the roadblock in the transportation committee. He described this as a “last minute turf battle” between committees, since the transportation committee has oversight over aviation, including the aviation side of the FAA.

For more details, read Alan Boyle’s MSNBC article. Hopefully the bill can be resuscitated, but if not, it would represent a significant blow to the commercial space industry, including the emerging space tourism market, just when they should be celebrating the successes of SpaceShipOne and other ventures.