Clark Lindsey explains the issues involved with yesterday’s legislative emergency for passenger spaceflight.

And he points out a very good piece by Richard Foss on the prospects for space tourism and the town of Mojave.

[Update in the afternoon]

Here’s a related piece from Space.com with several good points made by Jeff Greason:

Greason said he is in total agreement that it is necessary for regulators to ensure that potential passengers have adequate information. But he sees a “critical distinction” between the risk faced by the uninvolved public and that faced by those who want to fly into space.

“The uninvolved public has to be held to a very high level of safety,” he said. “There’s no reason they should be exposed to a level of risk that’s different than they see from any other aspect of industrial life.

“The involved passenger, the people who are deliberately putting their lives and treasure at risk to open the space frontier they’ve dreamed of their entire lives, as long as they know what they’re getting into, I think they have to be allowed to take that risk.”

One of the nation’s advantages, he asserted, is that there is still a “culture of risk acceptance as long as it’s only for the participant…”

…Greason said commercial space transportation, for it to succeed, has to chart new ground to improve the level of safety set by government programs such as the space shuttle.

“That means the classic regulatory prescriptive approach of ‘We’ll do it just like all those other successful very safe personal space transportation vehicles’ can’t work,” he said. “It’s a paradoxical, hard to understand thing, but in order to achieve greater safety, we have to allow many approaches to be tried, because only in that way can we find out experimentally those which offer greater safety.”

[Update at 3:45 PM EDT]

Jeff Foust has the latest word from former committee staffer Jim Muncy on the bill status, from this morning’s session of the Space Frontier Conference in Long Beach (which I wish I were attending, and almost certainly would be if I were still in southern California).