Jesse Londin has a good overview of the public (mostly industry) comments to the FAA-AST NPRM on suborbital launch regulations. This is an issue that I'm a little concerned about:

Along with the comments filed by the Peronal Spaceflight Federation, Pat Hoar for Space Adventures, offered a few additional thoughts; and with regard to the FAA's statement "The FAA does not expect orbital commercial human space flight to occur in the immediate future" Pat specified: "Space Adventures notes that it has sent three space flight participants to the International Space Station since 2001 with additional orbital space flight participants currently in training. Space Adventures assumes that the FAA intended to say '…orbital commercial human space flight using non-government launch vehicles…'"

Bretton Alexander, VP of government relations for t/Space also objected to the language about the government not expecting orbital in the near future, and noted it created "a negative perception with the public, potential investors, and developers..."

Yes. One of the things that's held back investment for years is such negative perceptions, and this has often been caused, inadvertently or deliberately, by stated policy or pronouncement of government officials (NASA and others) who supposedly know what they're talking about, but often don't. The problem is, while we fought and largely won the battle to establish a legal regulatory regime for suborbital passenger flight over the last couple of years, we don't have any similar enabling legislation for orbital passenger flight. It's potentially possible to extrapolate the new regulations to it, but that process would be fraught with regulatory uncertainty (not a good thing for raising money).

In an ideal world, of course, that which is not explicitly illegal would be legal, and we wouldn't need one, but in the real socialist world, in which the country remains bound by the OST with its obligations to accept government responsibility and liability for all US-based space activity, government and private, it's not too early to perhaps start thinking about some new legislation that can enable this sooner rather than later.

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