FAA Taking Hands-Off Approach to Space Travel
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.17.07 | 10:09 AM ET
From a USA Today story by Robert Davis: “In the latest space race—to lift paying customers out of Earth’s atmosphere—aviation safety regulators occupy a new niche: They are promoting an industry expected to suffer deadly accidents instead of applying strict safety rules.” It’s a function of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, which, according to Davis, treats the industry “more like an adventure business than an air carrier.”
He writes: “The law protects the rights of those who wish to be among the first private citizens to go into space—likening them to visionaries and adventurers who knowingly take other risks like climbing mountains—while giving the people who operate the new types of unproven spacecraft the scientific latitude to learn from their first fatal mistakes.”
Related on World Hum:
* ‘Backyard Inventors’ Help Usher in the Era of Space Travel
* Earth and the Meaning of Sputnik
* Space Traveler ‘Didn’t Even Visit the Moon, for Christ’s Sake’
Photo: NASA.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
