Space Politics

Reason magazine has published an excellent interview with Burt Rutan that focuses squarely on regulatory issues involved with commercial human spaceflight. Rutan, as many readers know, is not a big fan of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and has made it clear on a number of occasions that he would prefer to have vehicles like SpaceShipOne regulated as aircraft, through a certification process, rather than licensed like launch vehicles. (A view that puts him at odds with much of the rest of the nascent suborbital industry.) As Rutan puts it:

…we actually are asking for more regulation than the new legislation edicts. We do feel that the FAA needs to be accepting or proving the safety of the ship as it pertains to the passengers that get flown. Whereas their focus has been on only protecting the non-involved public who live on the ground below. We think that the industry will prosper only if there is some acceptance of [responsibility for] the safety of the ship as it pertains to the passengers.

Many industry advocates have argued that people should be allowed to take risks and fly in licensed vehicles to help open markets that promise to lower the cost of space access. Rutan doesn’t agree:

Now I don’t believe that it’s right to say, listen, we’ll let people take risks and we’ll go and build the kind of systems that have been used historically for manned space flight, and somehow solve the affordability problem, and that’s the only problem. We strongly feel that the biggest problem is the safety problem, not the affordability problem. If you fly dozens of people every day, you’ll get affordability with almost any kind of system. The safety problem is the biggie, and that’s why we think the most significant thing that came out of the SpaceShipOne program was not just showing that the little guy can fly above a hundred kilometers, without government assistance, and government technology, and government funds.

Rutan adds that although he disagrees with the current emphasis on the safety of the uninvolved public over passengers, he supports the other aspects of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, although he would like more specifics for the experimental permit authority granted in the legislation “to force FAA to regulate these tests more like airplane research rather than like they did our program.” Be sure to read the whole interview: Rutan provides a number of interesting insights into regulatory issues, flight testing, and related matters.

The Space Frontier Foundation and the Mars Society announced yesterday that they are jointly calling on NASA to mount a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. “The Hubble deserters’ embrace of irrational fear as a core ethic threatens a precedent that would preclude any future human accomplishments in space,” the Foundation’s spokesman, Rick Tumlinson, said in the statement. “Indeed, had such an ethic prevailed in our space program the past, we would never have been able to launch or repair Hubble, and the Apollo program would have been inconceivable. Should we embrace it now, the prospects for future human exploration of the Moon and Mars will decline to zero.” While the Space Frontier Foundation and the Mars Society have a lot in common—organizations with influence that goes beyond the relatively small sizes, featuring outspoken (and often polarizing) leaders—they usually have very different views on national space priorities, making joint statements like these relatively rare. (Although both organizations are members of the Space Exploration Alliance.)

Meanwhile, Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD) visited NASA Goddard yesterday and called on NASA to restore a robotic servicing mission to Hubble. Hoyer, whose district includes Goddard, said that the robotic servicing plan, dropped by NASA at the beginning of this year, “is a very important mission for us to continue and complete.” NASA associate administrator (and former Goddard director) Al Diaz, on the same tour, reiterated that “We don’t intend on servicing it, that’s where we are.” Hoyer, it should be noted, is the minority whip, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the House.

Most of a Tuesday morning briefing by Mark Albrecht, president of International Launch Services, focused on the state of the commercial launch industry in general and ILS’ performance in particular. However, the conversation did drift to NASA’s exploration program. For that Albrecht could offer some unique insights: earlier in his career he served as executive secretary of the National Space Council during the Bush/Quayle administration, the last time the council existed in any meaningful form, and also during the last time the space agency and the White House were planning a bold exploration program.

Not surprisingly, Albrecht tried to sell the capabilities of the Atlas 5 (marketed by ILS) and potential evolved, more powerful variants of the rocket to carry out much of the exploration vision, although he admitted that these would never have the capability of a clean-sheet heavy-lift vehicle specifically designed to launch as much mass into orbit as possible. “My personal experience is that you tend to compromise and try to figure out what you can do with existing technologies to get the most capability out of it,” he said. He supported the provision in the new national space transportation policy that requires NASA and the Defense Department to work together on recommendations for heavy-lift launch capability. “I’ve been there, and you really don’t want to be sitting in your office in the White House designing space stuff.”

He also cautioned that schedule is a major concern for any launch vehicle or other large development program associated with the Vision. “One of the pressures in dealing with these kinds of exploration initiatives is that time moves at double time, and any part of the project that takes three or four or five years to show any progress is just tough.” He noted that Apollo is particularly remarkable in this respect because its big budgets survived in Congress for years during its development phase with little visible signs of progress. “That’s a tough trick in today’s environment, to have a program that’s going to take six years to really show something that the average Congressman or customer can go look at, and during those years sustain a really aggressive funding profile.”

Albrecht also seemed enthusiastic about the selection of Mike Griffin as NASA administrator, perhaps giving him one of the biggest compliments possible: “Mike Griffin wants to go.”