In this posting last year I described an op-ed in Space News by Mike Gold, corporate counsel for Bigelow Aerospace. He talked about the hurdles and expenses that the ITAR export restrictions had placed on their use of the Russian launchers. He gave the egregious example of the requirement that they hire guards to protect a spacecraft stand that was little more than a metal coffee table. (Gold also talks about this in an interview at Res Communis.)

In the late 1990s Congress moved enforcement of the ITAR regime for spacecraft back to the State Department from Commerce. Lawmakers involved in this move told Bigelow that the State Dept. officials had misinterpreted their intent. Instead of focusing just on blocking the transfer of key technologies to a handful of hostile countries as they had intended, State had taken the easy bureaucratic route of simply marking any space technology going to any country as a munition and required that the exporter prove otherwise.

Waiting for Congress to change the law to make its intent more explicit could take many years. So Bigelow decided to try a different tactic. They would challenge State's rigid interpretation of ITAR by filing Commodity Jurisdiction (CJ) requests, which would

force the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) to rule on whether a particular technology or piece of hardware should be covered by the Department of State's U.S. Munitions List or by the Department of Commerce's Commerce Control List.

They won one of these CJ requests last week over the issue of foreign nationals going to Bigelow habitats.

Rob Coppinger comments on the fact that this does not settle all the issues involved with non-US visitors to privately owned space habitats:
/-- The Cold War's legacy, not ITAR is your problem Mr Bigelow - Hyperbola
/-- No space trip for you Mr Chen* - Hyperbola

I'm sure, though, that the Bigelow Aerospace lawyers are well aware of those complications. The importance of the recent ruling, however, is not the specific issue but the fact that it begins the process of circumscribing the areas where the State department can apply ITAR restrictions. I would expect that Bigelow and other companies will now start to file more CJ requests. If most of these succeed, then this first ruling may in fact one day be considered "glorious".