For the record, I think that these people are nuts. But it’s a good example of a recreation that is very hazardous, but that people are allowed to engage in without federal regulators looking over their shoulders. Why shouldn’t the same be true for spaceflight at this stage of the technology? I think that any of the serious vehicles currently under development (i.e., SS2, Lynx, Armadillo whatever) will be far safer than free diving or extreme mountain climbing.
[Late evening update]
Bad link, fixed now, sorry…
Shhhhhhhhhh
With you and Glenn talking about it, Leviathan has been alerted and will soon train their ponderous guns on free divers and mountain climbers….
anything for a cheap win during and election year. And if they can find a way to tax each dive, why, so much the better.
How long before people start arguing: “If I have to pay for their health care, then I should be able to regulate what risky hobbies people do in their free time”.
yup. Side effect of obamacare
Not sure if it was a side effect or the intended consequence for those who wanted it passed.
Link is now 404. Censored?
No, probably just a site overload from the Instalanche.
It’s still 404.
I guess Glenn and I broke it.
What regulating authority allows you to do is have a fairly easy way to kill rivals early—if one was so inclined and had the ability to influence those who needed influencing. Think of Pan Am holding onto the de-facto international route monopoly for decades.
But it does not have to be limited to rent-seeking commercial entities. If Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Robert Bigelow were foolish** enough to engage in politics at the same time as they were trying to do what they are doing right now, they might find the going a little harder. Or perhaps a lot harder. I wonder if Musk is still sore over the Vandenburg pad upgrade monies that SpaceX basically ended up wasting when the primes started using the pad next door. The point being that there are a lot of ways to run out the clock on a startup, which only has limited capital.
**of course, they have that right, but to the political class it would be “lese majeste”
Link is missing a character… just change the suffix to “.html” instead of “.htm” and it works.
I’m not a free diver but I am a very cheap diver!
Link requires an ‘L’ after the ‘HTM’… that fixes it.
The author shows how busybody we have become, noting that in his opinion, the only reason this is “allowed” to go on is that the local officials have no idea what’s happening.
There was a movie back in the eighties that used free diving as the motif to drive the narrative. Too cool Jean Reno was in it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Blue
I almost posted the same comment, Jardinero1. The movie was made in 1988, so predated the competition here. But I recall there being a competition involved — vaguely, however, because I saw it late at night and was half-asleep.