Right after the election, I pointed out one of the less-obvious consequences of it--Jim Oberstar's potential strangling of an infant industry in the cradle. Taylor Dinerman expands on the thought today.

In spite of some weasel wording, the hard legal requirements of Oberstar’s proposed regulation would effectively kill the whole entrepreneurial suborbital industry. The cost not only of developing a manned rocket that complies with the kind of safety burden that Oberstar wants, not to mention the astronomical cost of proving that a vehicle actually does comply with the regulations, will make it all but impossible even for the deepest pockets to build anything.

Even worse, Oberstar might open the door for the tort lawyers to come in and strip mine all the investment capital out of the industry. They almost killed off the US general aviation industry before Congress stepped in and put a stop to the lawsuit avalanche. In that case, tens of thousands of US jobs were at stake, but with the space tourism industry so far only hundreds of jobs are now at risk. The greatest danger is that all the thousands of high-paying jobs that the space tourism industry will create if the industry is left to develop under current rules will simply never exist.

I wish that folks like Oberstar were more worried about that potentiality than a few tourists potentially being killed in the early years.

I think he is over budget and didn't the commercial space act come out of commerce?

It had robust bipartisan support. I doubt he will be able to go back and poison it at this juncture.

No, it's a transportation bill. It authorizes the FAA to regulate launches.

All he needs to do is slip a paragraph into the FAA authorization bill. That will get voted in because otherwise the FAA budget would stop and force the entire agency to shut down.

Agencies don't require authorization to spend their money. Most years, NASA doesn't have an authorization. The only thing that matters is the appropriation bill, and Oberstar doesn't control that.

I should add that even if he does act to amend the DOT authorization, he'd have to get the Senate side to agree, or resolve it in his favor in conference.

The proposed premature and burdensome regulation is a prescription for economic stagnation. Edmund S. Phelps, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics identified this kind of legislation as the principal cause of Europe's economic malaise.

We here understand the enormous potential for future prosperity that space resources provide. We will never access those resources without cheap Earth to orbit transportation enabled by the suborbital innovators.

Sadly, a single paragraph may keep us shackled to the Earth indefinitely.

I doubt it. Sooner or later China is going to use up the resources in all those African countries it's currently investing in, and get hungry.

The US can either remove the crippling regulations on it's domestic industry and lead, or it can let its position in the world economy slowly decay like France.

A couple of belated notes: the original CSLAA (HR 3752 in the 108th Congress) was handled by the House Science Committee, and when Oberstar introduced his bill to amend it in the 109th, HR 656, it was also referred to the science committee (where it never saw the light of day.) That, of course, could change in the 110th.

Also remember that the CSLAA had considerable bipartisan support: HR 3752 passed in the House nearly unanimously back in early 2004, before Oberstar got involved (the only dissenting vote was cast by Ron Paul). Even after Oberstar got involved against HR 5382, about a third of the Democrats in the House still voted in favor of the legislation.