Touring Space

The June 21 flight of the first privately built manned spacecraft marked a turning point for the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation. To celebrate, Associate Administrator Patricia Grace Smith awarded the 63-year-old test pilot, Mike Melvill of Scaled Composites Inc., golden astronaut wings. "I looked in his eyes, and they were welling up with surprise and appreciation," she says. "My only worry was that he would start crying."

That day, the Alan Shepard of space tourism had taken his Mojave, Calif., employer's creation, SpaceShipOne, for a 24-minute suborbital spin outside Earth's visible atmosphere. During the trip to the edge of space and back, a critical flight control system failed and Melvill fought to stay on course. A backup system saved the day, enabling the craft to glide to a safe landing in the desert. Because of the problem, SpaceShipOne missed its touchdown target by 22 miles and fell short of its altitude target by more than five miles.

But Melvill still flew into history as the first nongovernment-sponsored astronaut. He made it to 328,491 feet, or about 62 miles-high enough to crack open the door to commercial space travel. The flight also upped the regulatory ante for the Transportation Department, which must approve the launches, but has no legal authority over the people who will ride. "[Our] prime responsibility is to ensure the safety of the uninvolved public. Our authority to regulate the safety of passengers is not as clear," says Ken Wong, an FAA space transportation safety engineer.

Scaled Composites is competing with 25 other teams from seven nations to win the Ansari X Prize. A $10 million purse will go to the first team that privately finances, builds and launches a three-seat manned spaceship to 62.5 miles, returns it safely to Earth, and repeats the feat with the same vehicle within two weeks. The St. Louis-based foundation that established the prize in 1996 expects a winner this year-in Canada, if not in the United States.

In its 20 years of existence, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation has licensed 165 commercial launches of unmanned, single-use rockets. Melvill's hair-raising adventure marked the first time the agency has issued a license for a reusable launch vehicle, a hybrid system with the characteristics of an airplane and a rocket. It issued the license April 1 and quickly followed up with a second license, to XCOR Aerospace in Mojave, Calif., for 35 test missions of a tourist shuttle. XCOR is not an X Prize contestant.

The fact that a human was aboard helped make the pathfinder licensing process arduous. X Prize competitor Michael Kelly, a member of FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, likened it to the pain of childbirth. Minting the new license category took at least 18 months of hard work. "We had to put the best minds on it and gather experience from every place we could find it in NASA and FAA," Smith says. "What we issued, at the end of the day, was a result of a corporate approach . . . that combined requirements and perspectives of both types of vehicles into one." The license grants permission to Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne developer Burt Rutan to conduct a series of flights through March 2005.

The 1984 Commercial Space Launch Act did not foresee corporate astronauts or the need for government authority over them, so OCST simply assumed it had responsibility in the case of SpaceShipOne. Regulators defined Melvill as a component of his craft's flight safety system, and held Scaled Composites to standards developed by the advisory committee. The guidelines, published last October, cover qualification and training of flight crews, environmental control and life support systems, fire detection and suppression, and human factors. In consultation with several X Prize applicants, the commercial space transportation office also is evaluating future mission plans based on regulations covering launch and re-entry licensing and financial responsibility for launch activities.

But the guidelines will remain just that until Congress clarifies the government's jurisdiction over commercial human space flight, especially concerning passengers. A July 2003 joint congressional hearing exposed widespread confusion about whether a hybrid system should be licensed under the Commercial Space Launch Act or certified for safety under the 1958 Federal Aviation Act. Witnesses urged Congress to establish a regulatory framework that would reduce the risk to investors.

A proposed Commercial Space Transportation Act amendment passed by the House of Representatives in March spells out the commercial space transportation office's authority over suborbital rockets and suborbital trajectories. HR 3752 would allow reusable launch vehicle developers to obtain an experimental permit to test their systems in space, under FAA supervision, before submitting them to the same rigorous license review Rutan's SpaceShipOne got. It also proposes requiring future spacelines to disclose a vehicle's complete safety history to potential passengers in return for their signature on a consent statement. A less explicit companion bill, S 1260, is stalled in the Senate.

Unresolved questions remain, including:

• How will the addition of humans on board affect FAA's regulatory responsibility and approach?
• Should FAA limit acceptable risk for humans aboard reusable launch vehicles? Current regulations specify risk criteria for protecting the uninvolved public, but not the passengers.
• How can the safety of humans aboard reusable launch vehicles be ensured? FAA assumes it has the authority to do so.
• What liability and financial responsibility do reusable launch vehicle companies have in the event of an accident with a passenger-carrying spaceship, and how will the government be indemnified?