I missed this earlier in the week, but Mike Snead has a long essay on passenger safety over at The Space Review. It’s a useful history, that touches on many of the themes of my book, but I believe that it’s technologically premature to apply the principles to human spaceflight. Spaceflight participants (not passengers) must be aware of the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships, and accept them accordingly. No one should, at this point in history, get aboard one with the same expection of getting safely off that one does with an airliner, particularly because different people have different risk tolerances and goals. There will come a time when trips to space will be considered common carrier, on certified vehicles, but we are years from that time.
10 thoughts on “Airworthiness For Spacecraft”
Comments are closed.
+1
I finally got around to reading the article. I didn’t need to read it to agree with Rand that it is too premature to start doing airworthiness for spacecraft (whether or not airworthiness is even the right word). Even experimental vehicles tend to have more information and operational history than spacecraft for certification purposes. A specific airframe may be new, but the principals of it are usually well understood and well tested before first flight. I think what we have now with informed consent is just fine, unless we start doing more launches over populated areas or a lot more private launches.
I guess saying it is a good history is fair. I was interested in the discussion of professional engineering, since I know they are hard to find in aerospace. I can’t tell if he was making a point or just telling the history. I’ll just say this: Government certification is not inherently more safer because it is the government doing it.
I just skimmed over it, but it appears worse than that.
He says that “Airworthiness does not preclude technology advancement”, and then cites examples of vehicles that are specifically excluded from airworthiness! The “experimental airworthiness certificate” he talks about is the only way left to avoid the need to get an airworthiness certificate, apart from ultralight.
Noting that almost all advancements are coming through ultralight and experimental aircraft which are not required to have airworthiness certificates should not be the basis for requiring certificates in spaceflight, where many advancements are still required!
(Of course, the FAA understands this as well!)
“the risks of the varied methods of building spaceships,”
Just FWIW, there has ever only been one fleet of actual space *ships* in history. There is not going to be another space *ship* until a BFR flies. Not every spacecraft is a ship.
Spaceships should be treated like Experimental homebuilt airplanes for a long time.
Placard that says ” Abandon hope all ye who enter” visible to all who do so.
Experimental homebuilts is where all the recent progress in small airplanes has occurred.
Although not quite so vivid as your proposed placard, that is essentially what the Commercial Space Launch Act requires through its informed consent regime. The operator has to tell the space flight participant the vehicle’s history and that the government has not certified it as safe.
If an airplane could only fly, by government edict, every 180 days at best, or if the previous flight had been not “as planned” and an additional several months were added to the 180 days to satisfy bureaucrats that the “not as planned” would not be repeated, how long would it take to build up the flight experience required to “certify” it?
Oh….and those delays apply not to demonstrating the safety of the airplane for its occupants, but to meeting arbitrary and arguably incalculable limits on the probability of hurting someone on the ground. Forget the people on board for a while. Quite a while, in fact.
How long would it take to get an airplane “certified” before it was considered safe, not for the passengers, but for the people on the ground? Or what if it was never possible to certify an airplane as safe for people on the ground, and every flight required at least 90 days advance notice before bureaucrats would give permission to fly?
Had aviation been regulated the way space transportation is, there would be no aviation today. Forget the expense. There would not have been enough time from the Wright brothers’ first flights until today to get an airplane “certified” to fly with “acceptable” risk to people on the ground.
I’ve just described, roughly, the environment posed by FAA/AST regulation of commercial space transportation. If that regulatory regime were applied to aviation, then aviation as we know it would never have existed.
And under the current licensing regime for commercial spaceflight, there is no possibility of ever achieving “common carrier” status for spaceships.
Ever.
And I predict that we never will.
That said, the FAA is happy to waive requirements that no longer make sense. They aren’t crazy people! The latest demonstration of that is the move to autonomous safety systems – something the regs did not foresee.
If you make a vehicle that can fly 10 times a day, the FAA will work with you on the official way to get all the pre-flight deadlines waived. You just have to be just as safe, and help them out.
The “every 180 days” strawman above under the current regime is simply wrong. One can obtain a “launch operator license” which licenses any launch of a type described in the license, and is valid for five years, for commercial operations. For test flights, the “experimental permit” is a one year term, renewable, and allows an unlimited number of test flights within that period.
Came across this video today. Looks like a KSC PAO piece on Commercial Crew Flight Test. I can remember times when something like this would be inspirational. Now I see this and just think it is filler to hide how much time they are wasting.
Funny how it mentions you can do all these tests, but what matters is flying. Damn, it would be nice if they recognized that years ago and started earlier with flying instead of all the analog tests meant to validate the need for multiple space centers.