Space Politics

A lot has been said of late of the very slow pace of activity in Congress, particularly in the Senate, where very little legislation, from space issues to budgets to judicial nominations, have been getting through. There are, though, exceptions to the rule, one of which is tangentially space-related. S.2315, with the descriptive title of “A bill to amend the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 to extend the deadline for the INTELSAT initial public offering”, was introduced by Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana on April 8. On April 27th the Senate approved the bill by unanimous consent, and referred to the House, which also passed the bill by unanimous consent on May 5. President Bush signed the bill into law on May 18, only 40 days after its introduction.

The bill amends an earlier law, the ORBIT Act, that set a deadline for satellite operator Intelsat, which was privatized several years ago, to conduct an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The deadlines in the original act had been extended several times, and prior to the passage of S.2315 stood at June 30, 2004. The bill extends the deadline one year, with the option of another six-month extension to the end of 2005. Intelsat wasted little time taking advantage of the measure: three days after it was signed into law the company announced it was withdrawing a planned IPO it announced earlier in the year. That’s good news to Lockheed Martin, Intelsat’s largest shareholder, which backed the legislation, hoping that an extension would allow Intelsat to wait until the IPO markets were better, or could find a buyout offer that was a better deal.

A couple of notes to follow-up on this earlier posting about concerns regarding HR 3752. At the full COMSTAC meeting at FAA Headquarters on Thursday, Pete Worden, the retired Air Force general who is serving as a Congressional fellow in the office of Sen. Sam Brownback, discussed the status of the bill in the Senate. He said there is a lot of interest in it in the Senate, but those most willing to push the bill through are busy working now on NASA authorization legislation, which should be introduced in the next few weeks. He hinted at the concerns regarding what kinds of vehicles the bill covers, adding that one unnamed Senator has raised the issue, but seemed optimistic that those concerns could eventually be worked through.

On Friday I talked with an industry expert familiar with the status of HR 3752. While I had previously noted that the specific concern—that vehicles that “self ferry” under jet power might not be considered a suborbital rocket under the FAA definition—was not new, this source said that the specific concern had actually emerged relatively recently. Even though the definition in the legislation was publicly unveiled at the Space Access ’03 conference in April 2003, and published in the Federal Register six months later, Rocketplane Ltd. didn’t voice their concerns about the definition until February, after the bill had been reported out of the House Science Committee. It has also been difficult for those working to advance the bill to figure out exactly what Rocketplane thinks it needs to resolve the issue. Congressional staff working on the legislation are said to be willing to accommodate Rocketplane on the issue, at least to some degree. The longer it takes to resolve this, this source warned, the less likely the bill will pass this year.

At Wednesday afternoon’s meeting of the RLV Working Group of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) at FAA Headquarters, there was a spirited discussion among participants about the status and fate of HR 3752. At least one person present had concerns about the bill because of the language used in the bill to define suborbital rockets:

‘suborbital rocket’ means 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.

While this covers a wide range of vehicles, from vertically-launched rockets to air-launched rocket-powered vehicles (like SpaceShipOne), there is a concern that it might exclude vehicles that take off under jet power, “self-ferry” some distance from the launch site using its jets, then fire its rocket engines for a suborbital flight. (An example is the XP from Rocketplane Ltd., formerly Pioneer Rocketplane.) Those vehicles might not strictly meet the definition because of their use of jet engines, and thus would either not be able to get a suborbital RLV license, or else would have to get both a launch license and an aviation certificate. Moreover, while suborbital RLVs can enter revenue service with a launch license, aircraft on experimental certificates cannot, thus requiring a potentially more expensive and time-consuming certification process.

This concern is not new, but has taken on added urgency for those most affected by it now that the bill has passed the House and is now sitting in the Senate. While others in the suborbital industry—as well as some FAA/AST officials—believe that this is not a big issue, and vehicles like the XP can get launch licenses, companies like Rocketplane Ltd. don’t want to be the test case for an ambiguous issue.

The obvious solution would be to change the definition of suborbital rockets in the Senate version of the legislation to make sure such borderline vehicles are clearly included. This, though, would make the Senate version different from the House version, requiring a conference committee to hash out the differences (assuming that the Senate does decide to accede to and accept HR 3752). However, in a year like this, with much bigger issues to contend with and the slow rate of legislative progress in the Senate, that could be fatal. As one attendee put it, “If this bill goes to conference, it will not happen this year.” That would mean starting all over again in the next Congress…