It would not instill confidence in your passengers. I understand that the glider pilots during the Normandy invasion had no parachutes.
Modern US equipment has similar features.
It is one thing to fly experimental launch vehicles. We do it all the time out in Mojave, either below the 500 meter height for “hobby rockets” or obtaining a permit for greater altitude launches. For experimental and prototype crewed vehicles, i.e. those for which you are flying for the purposes of development or verification testing, a waiver of personal liability is certainly acceptable. But a company which is in the business of selling rides to ordinary consumers at profit is no longer engaging in experimental flight; they are implicitly promising a vehicle that meets some minimum standard of reliability and maintenance, and poses hazard at only an accepted level (typically taken to be 1x10[SUP]-6[/SUP] deaths/person/flight for occupants, and 1x10[SUP]-6[/SUP] deaths/person/flight for people on the ground per current range safety standards).
It isn’t necessary that private space launches be strictly restricted to government run launch facilities and using the government operated Eastern and Western Ranges, and in fact it would be impractical for launch a high volume of flights from these facilities, as well as it is difficult to run foreign payloads from these sites. However, developing the necessary infrastructure for both the launch facility and range operations is a very expensive undertaking which cannot be borne initially by smaller, less funded contractors. Even SpaceX, which has been very well funded compared to other entrants into commercial spaceflight such as Rocketplane Kistler, Orbital Sciences Corporation, American Rocket Company, Sierra Nevada Corporation, et cetera, has to date used facilities leased from the government at Vandenberg AFB and Cape Canaveral AFS because these sites already had both the necessary infrastructure (pads, control bunkers, conduit and wiring, power, road access, et cetera) and a supporting range operation (30th Space Wing at VAFB, 45 Space Wing at CCAFS). SpaceX only now is building a private launch facility near Brownsville, TX, which is an “interesting” choice because the location places it close to both an inhabited town and the Mexican border, as well as essentially guaranteeing overflight of some foreign nation (probably Cuba), and gives evidence of being selected primarily due to tax incentives rather than optimal location. What SpaceX plans to do for range operations has not been revealed, but at a minimum launching from such a site would require downrange tracking assets (boats or aircraft) and a highly robust flight termination system.
Despite your sarcasm, there is a community of people who are quite familiar with the challenges of commercial spaceflight (which is new only in the sense that a college graduate is “new” insofar as the first purely commercial space launch by a US operator–Orbital Sciences–occurred nearly twenty-five years ago) and who have been attempting to promote the responsible operation of novel commercial space flight. However, these people do not work for nor are consulted by the FAA, as the agency’s primary charter is civil aviation and which in recent years has focused the bulk of its efforts and budget on implementing the badly needed NextGen air traffic control infrastructure. Whether the brief of the FAA should be expanded to explicitly include commercial space travel or whether a separate agency is necessary to assure that the appropriate level of attention and expertise is brought to bear is not the issue; whatever entity is responsible for implementing and enforcing regulations for commercial space travel has to have the expertise and technical capability to do so, which is currently well beyond what the FAA can or is currently chartered to do.
As for NASA, it is an operational agency, not a regulatory one. Naturally it has a vested interest in being the go-to organization for all yer space travel needs because that is exactly what it was chartered to do, just as the CIA is the provider for all of yer Commie-bashing, stop-em-at-the-38th-parallel, hold-the-line-in-Central-Europe, check-under-the-bed-for-Reds business and has struggled to find a mission in the post-Cold War environment. I wouldn’t recommend that NASA regulate commercial spaceflight or even necessarily provide guidelines based upon its past operation. Quite frankly, my opinion about NASA which has been expressed previously is that it has become a rather bloated bureaucracy with a few areas of strong technical competence (planetary exploration, space-based astronomy, experimental aeronautics, Earth and Solar surveillance) and would better be restructured as a clearinghouse agency which coordinates the efforts of industry partners and individual centers which should be spun off as privately managed FFR&DCs just as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (run by CalTech) is and has been since its inception (actually even before that). The NASA experience with spaceflight has offered a wealth of lessons learned and some useful standards, but their operational capacity to conduct spaceflight to a budget and schedule has been woesome, in large part because its mission is so politicized (and always has been) that it is subject to the changing whims of Congress and the executive branch.
Industry representation in the development of commercial spaceflight regulation should certainly include companies like Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites (provided they remain in the business) as well as other players like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences, Aerojet-Rocketdyne, and yes, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It should be the government’s role to act as an impartial and honest broker to those interests as well as representing the interests of the public at large and other potential entrants into the commercial spaceflight market. Certainly these companies are not going to have the public interest held at the forefront of their decisions.
Although commercial spaceflight has some analogue to civil aviation, there are some distinct differences which make it impossible to simply map the processes and capabilities developed for the latter onto spaceflight. The degree of hazard, the fact that space launch vehicles are not piloted by a human pilot on ascent, the sheer cost of developing new systems and the risks that entrants will take to attempt to display new capability, and the slender operational margins all dictate a need for an independent body to act in the public interest and assure that the hazards which do and will always exist are sufficiently mitigated such that they do not pose a greater risk to the public or put the industry at constant peril of enormous legal liability. As with civil aviation, following standardized procedures provides a degree of indemnification against suit which protects the industry as much as it does the public. And this will also provide a basis for a homogenized interface with the rest of the world when it comes to international commercial spaceflight. The alternative is that spaceflight providers go to alternative sites outside the US and operate in whatever manner they see fit consistent with the desire to achieve profitability regardless of hazard, which serves no one.
The NTSB, again, is an investigative agency and has no regulatory power whatsoever. Certainly it has made contributions to aviation safety, and it does actually have some significant amount of expertise when it comes to evaluating spaceflight accidents, but by itself it can do nothing to impose regulation or foster industry standards. It is not a substitute for a well-managed regulatory process which attempts to prevent, rather than explain, accidents and other hazards to the public.
It may just be my perception but you seem to bring a degree of conflict into the discussion which goes beyond mere challenge and into hostility over some insult or slight, as if recommending that some preemptive action to develop regulatory capability is tantamount to protectionism for existing aerospace companies or NASA. I can assure that, at least on my part, that is not the case. I have no vested interest in seeing the future of spaceflight dominated by NASA–quite the opposite as I outlined above–nor in protecting the existing interests like the joint ventures of Boeing and Lockheed of the United Launch Alliance (responsible for EELV flights) and United Space Alliance (responsible for previous Shuttle and future Space Launch System flights). I think these organizations have no vested interest in increasing access to space or reducing costs, and only competition by private industry will (and already has shown signs of) causing these organizations to review their costs and improve efficiency. I think commercial and private operations is the future of spaceflight operations with an organization like NASA providing technical support and advice, and a separate regulatory agency, be it the FAA or a new agency, representing government and public interests.
But the notion that we should just let private entrants into spaceflight “experiment” in whatever they way they wish regardless of their providing rides for profit or posing a public hazard simple isn’t acceptable from any standpoint. The first time a reentering vehicle crashes into the middle of a city, or a “space tourism” flight kills a high profile celebrity, the press and public will be all over the place with hand-wringing and demanding to know why the government didn’t do something about this problem previously, and why operators are permitted to function using ad hoc rules and risks without any kind of standards. It makes the most sense to forestall this by creating a framework beforehand which provides sufficient room for innovation while offering guidance to new and inexperience entrants and ensuring that reasonable provisions are made for safety and hazard mitigation.
Stranger
Passing laws that protect operators and suppliers from liability are probably not going to help.
I wonder if Virgin provides ejection seats for all passengers or just the pilots.
The intent of regulations or laws regarding commercial space transportation shouldn’t be simply to shield operators with blanket liability, but rather to provide a framework for competent design and responsible operation that allows operators to demonstrate that they have met or exceeded some baseline level of risk mitigation above which the traveling public should be reasonably expected to be informed about the relative hazards. In other words, and operator who follows the requirements and guidelines can say, "I did X, Y, and Z, and there was no practical way to predict or prevent my spacecraft from being struck by lightning or running into an invisible blue pink unicorn.
Stranger
No ejection seats for anybody. Pilots on test flights have parachutes, but need to egress via a hatch. Or in the case of the recent accident, have the aircraft come apart around them, leaving them and their non-ejection seat more or less alone out in the breeze.
For a significant part of the planned commercial flight profile, egress would not be possible even with a conventional ejection seat. Or more accurately you could be successfully egressed into space where you’d then die in the near vacuum without a space suit.
If someone in a suborbital trajectory jumped from 100km high, wearing a space suit or oxygen mask/isolating clothing, what would happen?
Stranger (and others),
Aside from ISS resupply, launching satellites and brief tourism, what might be commercial applications of private industry in space?
Manufacturing. Some processes do well in a weightless environment.
Some believe whoever figures out how to capture/harvest an asteroid for its various mineral, metal & water wealth could end up the world’s first trillionaire. Trillionaire’s don’t like living in smelly cramped little ISS capsules. They want the cool orbiting space colonies.
I’m not doubting that that is the safety standard, but I am wondering where you got it from and who set that standard.
If we can not, with our present knowledge and technology, achieve that level of safety could we still have commercial service? If so, what do you think would be acceptable?1x10[SUP]-5[/SUP]? 1x10[SUP]-4[/SUP]?
It took decades for commercial aviation to achieve the current level of safety, yet we had commercial aviation for those decades.
But Virgin Galactic is not using a rocket that requires a traditional rocket launch pad, are they? Granted, their vehicle has limited utility and is arguably a tourist ride - nonetheless, if there are sufficient tourists willing to pay (and assuming some acceptable level of safety, however defined) why shouldn’t they pursue their business model? In which case they don’t need a rocket launch pad, they need something more like a traditional airport runway from which to depart and return (the NASA space shuttle used a runway to land, too, even if a pad to launch). Since they need different facilities they wouldn’t be using those traditional launch pads at all.
I don’t see any entity with the “expertise and technical capability” to regulate commercial air travel, certainly none with experience because we’re at the very beginning of commercial space travel.
Probably what we really need is the equivalent of the ICAO for space travel to set some ground rules everyone can agree on, but I don’t expect that to happen until commercial space travel is already viable. These things tend to lag behind industry.
Rather like aviation had some analogue to prior modes of transportation but also distinct differences. I agree that one should not push the analogies too far, but perhaps the history of early commercial aviation holds some lessons for early commercial space.
I don’t see that “wild west” tactic of going where they can operate however the hell they want is going to work long term because the problem with space travel gone wrong is that stuff can fall down and land anywhere on the planet - like Skylab winding up in Australia (the young’uns probably aren’t old enough to remember that one, but I suspect you are). And wasn’t there some Soviet satellite than landed in Canada? At some point the world is going to collectively impose some order because everyone is vulnerable to stuff falling down from space - or someone will weaponize rock-throwing from orbit, which is a different problem.
Investigating and explaining accidents, though, is an integral part of producing safety regulations for aviation, and I think it will be for space as well.
We see that already - the initial assumption was that the SS2 engine blew up and in fact it did not. If even this most preliminary investigation hadn’t been done (and plenty rushing to judgement were so convinced of their notion they might have skipped it had they been in charge) we’d be chasing the wrong problem. Maybe the engine is safer than assumed and it’s mechanical problems that are the most serious risk here. Or maybe not. The point is, you can’t improve safety unless you have good knowledge, and that takes proper investigation.
I think we’re largely in agreement there, my animosity is largely directed at the nay-sayers who think we shouldn’t dare to be in space at all which can spill over into tangential issues at times.
Then handle like experimental aviation - the experimenters can experiment as long as they are taking precautions to put no non-participants at risk. Granted, this is a bit more of a trick for space travel than for a homebuilt microlight but the principal is sound. I don’t want to stiffle original thought or experimenting, nor do I want the public at risk. Surely there is a middle ground here.
The reason Scaled Composites is conducting test flights where they do is precisely so that if their vehicles fall out of the sky the risk to others is minimal. This is as it should be.
Handling additional participants is an issue - there had to be a modification to the X-prize requirements because the FAA would not permit non-essential personnel i.e. “passengers” along on the record-setting ride, so sandbags of suitable weight were stand-ins for those. VG will have to achieve some level of demonstrated safety/air-worthiness before the first customer sets foot on SS2.
This article suggests that pilot error may have been the proximate cause:
Oh, right. It’s always ‘pilot error’. :rolleyes:
[^ Sarcasm. 
] Actually, I believe most crashes are caused by pilot error – or at least it’s a major factor in the chain of events. But I’ve met many people who reject ‘pilot error’ as a finding because that’s the usual finding.
Pending further information, it does sound like the copilot screwed the pooch on this one.
I foresee a time when computers will be used, to prevent such disasters.
A guy who was one of the patrons at the library where I worked had been a Marine pilot. A friend of his was killed when he had to change frequencies from the control tower to wherever he has going. The aircraft had new equipment in awkward places. He bent over to tune a new radio under his seat, became inverted, and did not believe his instruments all the way down.
It’s odd that the reentry mechanism would be unlocked so early in the flight, even during normal operations; why is that?
I would not think that pilots screw around and play with buttons and levers.
I heard this about the AV-8B Harrier: ‘If something bad happens when you change the thrust vector, change it back to where it was.’
Well, yeah.
If you have time.
Well, of course not, but from the link I commented the unlocking of the tail is SOP 20 seconds after release and flying past Mach 1.4 instead of 9 seconds and Mach 1 as supposedly happened; which to me it seems odd since that unlocking is for the tail to pivot up at reentry and I can’t see why they would unlock it practically at the beginning of the flight when it can cause a catastrophic failure.
Perhaps the tail does double duty, the first being to cause the ship to pitch up and go into higher altitude? The ship doesn’t seem to have much pitch control aside from the tail.
I guess unlocking it at mach 1.4 might be to avoid transonic problems. You don’t want to do much that could cause you go be unstable when you’re near the speed of sound.
I’m sure LSLGuy and Stranger will correct me if anything of that is inaccurate.