The suborbital launch legislation seems to have finally given up the ghost, at least for this year. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly given the fact that it almost passed a few weeks ago with a pill that would have poisoned the new suborbital passenger industry by overregulating it.

As Nathan Horsley points out in comments at Space Politics,

While a clear statutory basis for manned launch licensing is a desirable goal in that it would make it easier for new companies to tailor their designs to the regs, the existing companies should be able to go ahead under the current regime. The fact is that even under a new regulation, the licenses are still going to have to be tailored to each individual craft and mission plan (or at least series of similar mission plans). Further, the new push to include passenger safety as a factor in licensing is very dangerous. While the newest compromise limits this to situations where there has already been an accident, this is at best a marginal gain for the launchers in terms of insurance availability and litigation risk.

Bottom line, given that the FAA AST is doing a pretty good job under the current regime, sending the legislators back to the drawing board is not so bad a thing, and won’t even force launchers overseas.

Also, more from Alan Boyle here.

There’s apparently a lot of public support for going back to the moon, but not much for going to Mars.

While I agree with that sentiment, I found this part a little less encouraging:

Out of 5 options, Americans ranked “International participation and cost-sharing” as their #1 choice for funding the Vision — with certain conditions.

That’s a failure of public education, to my mind (or a success of propaganda, depending on your point of view…). They don’t realize that “cost sharing” tends to increase costs to the point that we end up spending more than we would if we simply did it on our own.

And here’s some more propaganda that people seem to have absorbed:

Americans understand and appreciate the benefits of the space program (“spin-offs,” science, and the impact of space-based technology developments to daily lives).

My concern with this is not just that it’s probably not true (spinoff is highly overrated as a net benefit of space programs), but that if the purpose of having a space program is international cooperation and spinoff, it becomes possible to have a program that achieves those goals with no discernable progress in actually doing something in space. See the ISS for a sterling example.

…is scheduled for a week from today at the Cape, between 2:30 and 5:30 PM EST.

I’m going to try to go see it–it should be pretty spectacular. One of the few benefits of living in Florida that I’ve found so far.

Bob Bigelow has announced the rules for his new fifty-million-dollar prize for an orbital vehicle. I saw this yesterday, but haven’t posted because I haven’t had time to think much about it, but Derek Lyons has.

Jon Goff has an excellent roundup of the recent Space Frontier Society conference in Long Beach, for those of us not fortunate enough to have attended.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

Keith Cowing is having some legal problems with Orbital Sciences Corp.

XCOR needs a new subsystem for their rocket propulsion development. They’re offering a prize.

Jay Manifold has an extensive follow up on my original short post.

I hope that this story is true, and if it is, it’s one more reason for me to support the reelection of the president. It’s certainly not something that a Kerry administration would consider (except possibly to make things worse).

[Via Mark Krikorian]

CNN talks to Mark Shuttleworth. Most of the discussion is about his privately financed trip to Mir, but he does talk about the future of the industry:

Shuttleworth: We’re just starting to see the first private vehicles being certified as safe for flight, carrying passengers to the edge of space and back. Now, to put that in perspective, 30 years ago NASA and the military had vehicles that were capable of doing the same thing. But these are now vehicles that have been entirely privately designed. So in the next year or two, we’ll actually see the first privately funded space flights that take people out of the atmosphere and back. And those aren’t sort of Mercury Star or Apollo Star or Soleal Star orbital flights; they don’t go round the Earth and go into orbit. They literally shoot up like a canon ball, get you out of the atmosphere into space and falling back to land within a couple of minutes of your launch. That’s the first step that will really lay the groundwork for a whole exploration of private space flight.

Within five years I expect that we’ll have regular private flights, so that people paying relatively small amounts of money to have the privilege of being shot out of the atmosphere, experiencing the Earth as seen from space, that incredible sight of the Earth without borders, and then experiencing weightlessness and the feeling of looking into the universe, you realize just how small the Earth and solar system are in the context of the broader universe. So that’s really what we’ll see over the next five years. And then in 10 to 15 years, that will have grown to the point where maybe we can expect to see four orbital flights, entirely privately funded with vehicles that are entirely privately designed. There’s a tremendous amount of capital now going into the private space industry on the basis of somebody having done it. It’s like the four-minute mile. Once somebody does it the first time, everybody else wants to step up and give it a run. So, this really is the cusp of a new era.

Curnow: Which nations will dominate?

Shuttleworth: Clearly there is a lot of American capital going into private space flight at this stage. A lot of the technology, though, is still Russian and there are other countries entering the space race as well. India, China and Brazil all have developing capacity in space. I’ve no doubt though that it will be American-driven investment that leads the private exploration of space.

Curnow: What about private visits to the moon?

Shuttleworth: Well, the two are very intricately interlinked. It’s space tourism that’s going to reduce the cost of getting to space. Once you reduce the cost of getting to space, then national space budgets — the amount of money that NASA spends keeping people in lowest orbit, for example — can be used to take us that much further. It’s going to be a very rich interplay between commercial space flight, private space flight and a public exploration into the solar system for the greater good of humanity. The two are absolutely interlinked and we couldn’t realistically get to the moon without reductions in cost that will only come from private space tourism.

Emphasis is mine.

I’m not sure what he means by “four orbital flights.” Does he mean four companies offering them?

Unfortunately, he wasn’t asked what his own investment plans were.