KIHEI, Hawaii — Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has introduced laws that will extend a restriction on the Federal Aviation Administration’s ability to control business human spaceflight safety by one other eight years.
McCarthy announced Sept. 21 he has introduced the Space Transformation And Reliability (STAR) Act. The one-page bill would extend what’s alternatively called a “learning period” or moratorium on certain safety regulations, set to run out at the top of this month, through September 2031.
“As we glance to the century and beyond, the business space industry is crucial to advancing U.S. national security and scientific discovery, and I’m confident that the STAR Act will help proceed to offer this industry with additional time to fly, innovate and grow,” McCarthy said in a press release in regards to the bill.
The regulatory restriction, which limits the power of the FAA to promulgate regulations regarding the security of spaceflight participants on board business vehicles, was enacted in 2004 and designed to present industry time to accumulate experience upon which regulations could possibly be based. The restriction was set to run out in 2012 but has been prolonged several times since then, and is now set to run out Sept. 30.
While it’s unlikely that the bill can change into law before the top of the month, a brief expiration of the restriction would have little impact on business space activities. FAA officials have said that the top of the restriction would only start a long-term process to enact safety regulations.
“From a practical sense, not much could be modified” if the restriction expires at the top of the month, said Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for business space transportation, in a Sept. 18 interview. “We don’t have a set of drafted regulations all ready in a file cabinet that we will spring on the industry.”
He said the FAA is working to arrange for a time when it may draft safety regulations for spaceflight participants. That included establishing this summer a space-related aerospace rulemaking committee, generally known as a SpARC, that features members of industry and academia to start studies of potential future regulations.
“They’ve just begun some really good work attempting to determine what an appropriate framework must seem like and what the timing of that ought to be,” Coleman said.
Developing regulations, he added, will likely be a long-term process. He noted that streamlined launch licensing regulations, known within the FAA as Part 450, took about two years to develop at what he described a “pretty accelerated” pace.
“Regulations take years to actually do, and do right,” he said. “For my part, really to get it right you wish somewhere between three to 5 years.”