Briefs: House hearing on NASA; Nelson's hearing on com-space

I think that Sen. Nelson was making the point that the AST doesn't have authority to regulate safety of commercial launch vehicles for orbital crew or cargo, only the incidental safety of uninvolved third parties who may be affected by the launch. AST may have been getting ahead of themselves, thinking they can regulate safety for NASA passengers flying on commercial orbital crewed vehicles, but they can't at this time.

Or at least, that is how I read the current state of affairs.

Posted by Gary C Hudson at 03/19/10 01:56:08

the whole thing was a sham. one senator heard the hearing. what does that mean.

Posted by donnie at 03/19/10 06:11:05

Why should NASA be the agency to determine what safety regulations exist for commercial crew vehicles? I admit that if NASA astronauts are involved, they can set their own standards that they would consider acceptable for their own crew members to go, but that doesn't apply to non-NASA trips into space.

I'm guessing that the meme here is that NASA astronauts == Americans in orbit

To me, it would be like the National Science Foundation being in charge of regulations of all oceanic vessel regulations.

BTW, the FAA has both the authority to regulate the design and safety standards of any sort of vehicle that travels through the air, as well as to act as a traffic control operator. While there may be some assumed authority on the part of the FAA, they have been issuing flight worthiness certificates and granting experimental waivers for commercial spacecraft for awhile now. From the perspective of the FAA-AST, this is no different than what the rest of the FAA does with commercial aviation.

Of course this sort of in-fighting is precisely why I'm glad that the FAA-AST even exists. It is a separate bureaucracy that has its own constituents. It also is much more logical that an independent agency with regulatory authority but no skin in the game is going to be in charge of setting standards.

By skin in the game I'm mentioning that NASA not only is establishing standards, but that as an operator of spacecraft they are also a competitor to commercial spaceflight. It is this conflict of interest on the part of NASA to set standards up in such a way to drive away "competitors" that should be of grave concern, particularly if NASA is going to have their own launchers. This was the problem with commercial spaceflight in the 1980's when the Shuttle ended up becoming a major competitor that drove out of business any sort of commercial spaceflight opportunities with insanely subsidized launch prices for commercial customers. This point needs to be driven home again and again, noting that NASA has a pretty lousy track record for supporting commercial spaceflight except for when their own employees are involved.

Posted by Robert Horning at 03/19/10 09:04:15

There are three issues at work here:

1) Safety of the uninvolved public...this is an FAA/AST statutory responsibility and should be nearly trivial to comply with since there are no requirement beyond those applied for a comsat, i.e., normal range safety.

2) Safety of the commercial orbital spaceflight participants who are not NASA astronauts...at the moment there is no law on this subject and best if there isn't any for some time to come. This issue may have been key to the confusion between Sen. Nelson and Geo. Nield of AST yesterday at the hearings. If it was AST saying they have the right to regulate crew safety, then the boot must come down on them and fast. It may have been the latter, since they have occasionally toyed with asking for the power to regulate orbital stations...yes, that means Bigelow.

3) Safety of any NASA astronaut passengers...NASA can set a requirement for safety of these folks. Companies can comply or not as the they wish, depending on how important NASA crew business is to them. ***This set of "requirements" does not affect the ability of anyone to launch into space with a human crew, unless these categories get confused.***

What we *don't* want to have happen is that any requirements from NASA for their people only become the law of the land, unless they are reasonable and low-level (and you know they won't be). Given the amount of crazy reporting plus vicious rumors, lies and general other nastiness that has attended the rollout of the Bolden Plan, it is very reasonable to fear the conflation of these NASA requirements with further FAA/AST-desired rules/regulations or statutes, via incompetence, malevolence or just simple confusion.

Posted by Gary C Hudson at 03/19/10 11:58:53

Hi Gary,
I agree those are all important issues. I was just saying that the brief exchange that came late in the hearing only dealt superficially with NASA vs FAA and commercial crews. It was not the major dispute in the hearing that Pasztor made it out to be. (The remarks start around 163 minutes into the webcast.)

Regarding issue (2), the CSLAA says
"(c) SAFETY REGULATIONS - (1) The Secretary may issue regulations governing the design or operation of a launch vehicle to protect the health and safety of crew and space flight participants."
There are limitations on this, particularly for the 8 years following the passage of the Act, but certainly sounds like the FAA can issue regulations related to the safety of non-NASA crews and passengers.
- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 03/19/10 12:55:07

Clark, I don't follow the legislative twists and turns like I used to – to depressing – but I thought those spaceflight participant words applied only to suborbital?

If not, then the battle is lost already.

Posted by Gary C Hudson at 03/19/10 13:00:45

Gary,
I found this text of the whole law, which is somewhat easier to understand:
http://www.faa.gov/about/of...

Spaceflight participant "means an individual, who is not crew, carried within a launch vehicle or reentry vehicle."

A "launch vehicle" means "(A) a vehicle built to operate in, or place a payload or human beings in, outer space; and
(B) a suborbital rocket."

So it covers both orbital and suborbital.

My eyes glaze over in trying to read all the legal-eze but I don't see anything restricting the above "Safety Regulations" item to suborbital. It's in the general section for launch licensing.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 03/19/10 13:37:25

Ah. So...everyone on board is deemed crew. They are on Soyuz, of course, and that solves the problem.

Posted by Gary C Hudson at 03/19/10 13:59:06

It strikes me it would be fairly easy to amend the laws governing the AST so that NASA, which has actual experience in HSF, would establish the standards and then AST would merely enforce. That way space tourists would be assured of the same high standard of safety required for astronauts. After all, what business does an agency that has never flown anyone in space have in determining standards for it. That is like having a lawyer with no construction industry experience or engineering background writing building codes. Great for the building industry perhaps since they may write lax standards, but bad for the public.

Posted by Reader at 03/19/10 21:43:26

The concern I have about letting NASA set the human spaceflight standards is the idea that political pressure from those who want to kill off commercial spaceflight as competition to things like Constellation are going to be setting those standards up in such a way that private companies simply can't meet those standards.

In other words, NASA is not a neutral party here.

I wish this wasn't the case here, and I'll admit that any sort of human spaceflight standards ought to include input from NASA, but letting NASA set those standards is the issue I'm having problems with.

Also, I'd like to point out that the FAA is hardly an agency with zero experience with regards to even establishing standards for vehicles that go up off the surface of the Earth. They have aeronautical engineers who certainly understand the issues related to flight in general, and the FAA-AST also has many folks who are quite familiar with the issues related specifically to spaceflight. If spaceflight is going to be routine and be done by non-NASA American astronauts on American built and operated spacecraft, it seem to me that the FAA is the logical agency to be the regulatory agency in charge.

This is the issue.

Undoubtedly NASA is going to have a huge say on this anyway regardless of who actually has final say on what is going to be the actual commercial human spaceflight standards. Still, who is going to be there to say "slow down there, NASA", or more significantly get NASA to follow their own standards on their own vehicles? Current human spaceflight standards have yet to be followed by NASA themselves, so why should they be followed by anybody else?

Posted by Robert Horning at 03/20/10 02:34:42

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