Jeff Foust reports on an upcoming hearing on the safety of human spaceflight. As he notes, there is only one obvious proponent of commercial provision of such services asked to testify. I don’t know what General Stafford thinks about the subject, but I fear it. And note that no one from the FAA-AST will be present, though they will probably be involved, eventually, with passenger safety on commercial vehicles. The worst thing, of course, is that the hearing will be chaired by Jim Oberstar, who is on record as being hypersensitive to safety issues at the expense of progress. That’s unfortunately one of the consequences of the past two elections, though hopefully it will be rectified next November. Expect to hear a lot of talk about how the private sector can’t be “trusted” with the safety of astronauts, but that the agency that has killed fourteen of them in the past quarter century can.
7 thoughts on “Stacking The Deck?”
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According to the link, a subcommittee of the Science & Technology Committee is holding the safety hearing. Concurrently the aviation subcommittee of Oberstar’s Transportation & Infrastructure Committee is having a hearing on commercial spaceflight. It’s not clear that Oberstar will chair since the subcommittee has its own head.
My uninformed assessment is that commercial spaceflight has too much momentum for Congress to stop (although they can certainly cripple America’s role).
As long as we are more obsessed with safety than with discovery and scientific progress, we’re never going to get anywhere in space. To think our ancestors crossed the ocean in little wooden boats with no safety procedures whatsoever beyond “hope we don’t capsize in a storm or set our boat alight from the galley fire.”
I think Mr. Simberg is conflating two separate hearings. Just to be clear, the list of witnesses on Mr. Foust’s site is for a hearing on NASA astronaut safety, while Oberstar will be chairing a separate hearing (that just happens to be at the same time) on commercial space flight safety.
Thank you for the clarification, but if that’s the case, why is Brett Alexander testifying at the NASA one? Or is he not? Who is testifying at which?
OK, in rereading, I see that no witness list has been released for the Oberstar hearing. Still no explanation as to why Brett is testifying about NASA flight safety, though.
So, when OCST was moved to FAA we were promised that the clout of the bigger agency would become available to the commercial launch sector. Where’s FAA’s congressional liaison and how come they didn’t get AST on the agenda?
More broadly, we’re seeing the problem of commercial space being treated by the standards of the mature air transport industry. If you’re assigned to the Department of Ducks, you get regulated like a duck.
Even if you’re an eagle.
Brett Alexander is on the NASA Advisory Council, heading a committee on commercial space. It fits.