I only had time on Friday to go downtown to the conference to hear the final panel session - "Space Tourism: Thought-Provoking Questions" - and George Nield's summary remarks.

Jesse Londin reported on the morning sessions, More from FAA/AST Space - Space Law Probe - Feb.10.06, which included a talk by Tim Hughes, chief counsel of SpaceX . (Sorry I missed meeting Jesse. Maybe we will overlap at one of the other space events this year. I will keep a strong grip on my laptop, though. ;-) )

The Space Tourism panel was quite interesting, particularly the first presentation by lawyer Tracy Knutson who specializes in recreational law with a focus on extreme sports and adventure tourism. (Her website's motto is "Maximizing Adventure by Minimizing Risk".) She had not known about space tourism before being asked to come to the conference but in the interim had learned a lot and her presentation had a fresh perspective aspect to it. (She is an engaging speaker. I recommend that other space conferences dealing with space tourism invite her.)

She first reviewed the legal issues involved when organizations want to carry out risky recreational activities and want to protect themselves from being sued out of existence when an accident happens. This page on her website covers many of the topics that she mentioned. A particular focus is on risk management, which begins with listing and ranking the risks involved in a particular service and trying to ameliorate the most significant ones. She then discussed various terms and topics such as negligence, contributory negligence, informed consent, waivers, etc.

It's often said that consent forms and waivers don't offer much protection in the US courts. Knutson said that judges do usually take a "paternalistic" approach and try to find flaws in consent forms, i.e. they want to make sure people were not bambozzled into signing away their rights. However, she said that consent forms CAN be made to work if crafted extremely carefully.

Note: Seems to me that the space tourism companies should require that a participant have his or her own lawyer co-sign the forms to make it very clear that the person was fully informed of the meaning of the legal language.

The other panelists included Chris Faranetta of Space Adventures who discussed a Government/Private hybrid approach to space development. E.g. the government can regulate and act as a first customer for services offered by private space transport companies.

Vincent Sabathier discussed European law and space tourism. He started out by joking that it would be a very short talk. The EU legal framework for commercial space transport and for space tourism is several years behind that in the US and so companies have to deal with national laws. However, there are currently few European companies trying to do space tourism or commercial launches. He expected that Europe would eventually implement much of the FAA model. He proposed that Europe sponsor a competition for a point-to-point suborbital system to help encourage private spaceflight development in Europe. He is working on the Human Space Exploration Initiative (HSEI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and it recently issued a white paper on human spaceflight.

Finally, another lawyer on the panel, John Gantt, gave an overview of the various treaties and conventions that deal with space tourism.