WASHINGTON — As two firms prepare to start or resume industrial suborbital human spaceflights, they’re facing uncertainty about how the security of the people on those flights will likely be regulated.
Virgin Galactic conducted its first industrial flight of its VSS Unity SpaceShipTwo vehicle June 29, flying three Italian payload specialists on a research mission designated Galactic 01. The corporate plans to start monthly flights of personal astronauts on that vehicle as soon as early August.
It joins Blue Origin, which began flying paying customers on its Recent Shepard suborbital vehicle in 2021. Recent Shepard has been grounded after an engine problem on a September 2022 payload-only flight, although Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said at a June 6 conference that the corporate can be able to resume flights “inside the subsequent few weeks.” The corporate has not provided any further updates on flight plans.
Each firms operate under a regulatory regime by the Federal Aviation Administration that focuses on the security of the uninvolved public. Federal law sharply restricts the FAA’s ability to enact regulations for the security of spaceflight participants on industrial vehicles. This restriction, called a “moratorium” by some in the sphere and a “learning period” by others, limits the FAA’s ability to enact such regulations to accidents that caused death or injury, or had the potential to cause death or injury.
That restriction was included within the Business Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 and, on the time, was to last eight years, giving industry time to accumulate flight experience upon which regulations might be based. It has been prolonged several times and is now currently set to run out at the top of September.
Many in industry have been lobbying for an additional extension, arguing that firms are only now starting to fly vehicles on a routine basis, allowing them to develop that have the restriction was designed to foster.
“The difficulty of the training period is, should the federal government be limited to only regulate if there may be evidence requiring regulation or should they be allowed to manage prospectively without data, with none specific reason to manage?” said Jim Muncy of PoliSpace during a panel discussion on the subject by the Beyond Earth Institute in May.
A report by the RAND Corporation in April, though, advisable that the present restrictions be allowed to run out this 12 months. It concluded that doing so would allow the FAA and industry to maneuver forward on developing regulations in gradual, coordinated process.
“It doesn’t mean we’re recommending a big stockpile of regulations immediately. The truth is, it’s just the other,” said Bruce McClintock, senior policy researcher at RAND, through the Beyond Earth webinar. “We’d broadly call this expanding the training period to incorporate more tools and resources.”
It’s unclear if the present restriction will be prolonged. The House and Senate have been working on their versions of reauthorization laws for the FAA, but neither currently includes any language concerning the learning period. The House Science Committee is working on a separate industrial space bill that would address the problem. Nonetheless, any bill faces long odds of passage before Oct. 1.
“We’ve a divided Congress, so the power to maneuver an extension through could also be a bit difficult this 12 months,” said Caryn Schenewerk, president of CS Consulting who previously worked on regulatory issues for Relativity Space and SpaceX, through the webinar. Failure to attain an extension, she said, could also be less of an energetic decision by Congress than a side effect of broader debates between the Republican-led House and Democratic-led Senate.
Should the restriction expire on Oct. 1, FAA officials have said they don’t have a set of regulations able to be enacted, but are taking a look at ways of cooperating with industry to shorten the event time for spaceflight participant safety rules.
Mike Moses, president of spaceline missions and safety at Virgin Galactic, said in an interview after the Galactic 01 flight he has been encouraged about discussions his company, together with Blue Origin and SpaceX, have had with the FAA on how regulations might be developed.
“The thought can be to take the info we’ve learned and use that to craft very specific, focused development areas,” he said, emphasizing the necessity for performance-based regulations given the various technical approaches those three firms are taking for human spaceflight. “One set of regulations just won’t apply to all.”
He also played down any impact on the industry, or the talk on regulations, from the June 18 accident of a industrial deep-sea submersible, Titan, built and operated by OceanGate. That accident, which killed the five people on board, raised scrutiny concerning the level of regulation of that industry and parallels with industrial spaceflight, given each are types of adventure tourism with similar clientele; certainly one of the people killed on Titan, Hamish Harding, flew on Blue Origin’s Recent Shepard in 2022.
Moses said any comparison of that accident with industrial spaceflight is an “apples-to-oranges” one provided that there may be existing regulation of economic spacecraft to guard the uninvolved public. “It actually drives accountability. You’re not totally unsupervised,” he said. “It’s a really different thing compared to OceanGate.”