Private Space Flight: Barriers, Regulations, and Public Perception

Introduction

Humans have always been an adventurous and pioneering species. At great personal risk, people have climbed difficult mountain terrains and ventured into hostile, unexplored locations with little idea of what they might find. This risk-taking spirit, though sometimes costly, has ultimately helped human civilization to progress, evolve, and thrive. Since the early twentieth century, space and air have been two of humanity's greatest frontiers. Only in recent years has there been a renewed spark of innovation in spaceflight, as the space aeronautics industry has attracted the interest of private-sector firms — in part at the encouragement of the government. The commercialization and privatization of spaceflight has injected much-needed energy into the space industry. Privatization alone has introduced new possibilities and concepts in the few years it has been implemented. However, many obstacles still block the goal of making space travel a reality for ordinary people.

This paper investigates the perceptions, barriers, and regulations surrounding private spaceflight, and examines how the recent launch failures of both Orbital Sciences and SpaceX — including the 2014 accident involving SpaceShipTwo, which is still being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) — affected public attitudes toward commercial space travel.

The space travel industry has a comparatively short history. Despite its initial sluggishness, the industry has experienced rapid development over the last twenty or so years. Once a government-only domain, the space industry has also attracted private investment. Since the first commercial space tourist flight in 2001, a number of wealthy individuals have purchased tickets to space. Currently, over 625 people have booked sub-orbital space travel aboard Virgin Galactic (Soular, 2013). Nevertheless, enormous barriers remain before space travel can become a reality for the average person. This paper examines these barriers in depth and analyzes the reasons behind them.

Literature Review: Recent Accidents and Industry Confidence

It has been a difficult period for space travel. The recent disintegration of Falcon 9, a SpaceX rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS), was the first failure for that vehicle; however, the broader situation is more troubling for NASA, which witnessed a 75% failure rate across four spacecraft it had contracted to ferry supplies to the ISS over an eight-month span. In October of the prior year, an Orbital Sciences rocket, Antares, crashed and burned several seconds after launch. Then, in April, an unmanned Russian spacecraft, Progress 59, lost contact with its ground station, veered out of orbit, and later disintegrated in the atmosphere. Both Antares and Progress 59 were carrying equipment, food, and scientific research materials to the ISS — as was Dragon, another SpaceX rocket, which disintegrated during its lift-off from Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida.

All three accidents appear to be unrelated, and industry stakeholders have repeatedly offered their familiar response after each incident: that rocket science will always be rocket science, and that a certain degree of failure cannot be avoided. Despite these sentiments, the accumulated accidents have alarmed many observers — particularly members of Congress who have been reluctant to allocate funds for NASA's partnerships with private commercial entities such as SpaceX (Moskowitz, 2015).

Public support for space industry commercialization suffered a further blow barely 72 hours after the Antares mishap, when SpaceShipTwo, a Virgin Galactic suborbital spacecraft, crashed during a test flight, resulting in one fatality. Despite an ongoing investigation into that accident, Virgin Galactic has continued pressing ahead with its plans to fly space tourists on short arcs at the edge of space from its New Mexico facility known as Spaceport America (Moskowitz, 2015). In cases such as this — where the project involves flying only wealthy passengers who have paid enormous sums for brief visits to space — many people are understandably skeptical about whether such ventures offer meaningful benefit to society as a whole. Every tourist has paid over $20 million for a short, seven-day trip, and even a drastic price reduction would make it difficult to envision such travel ever becoming affordable for anyone who is not extraordinarily wealthy (Stromberg, 2014).

Licensing Frameworks and FAA Regulations

NASA is no longer the only federal agency involved in spaceflight. As commercial flights move closer to reality, the FAA published a framework of recommended practices for human space travel safety. The document, titled Recommended Practices for Human Space Flight Occupant Safety, was published on September 16 to establish a baseline in the event that federal regulation becomes necessary in the long term. Commercial spaceflight programs have been gaining momentum, particularly following the conclusion of NASA's shuttle program in 2011. NASA is now awarding contracts to private firms to send the first commercial crew to the ISS (Williams, 2014).

By publishing recommended practices, the FAA may be ushering in a new era of spaceflight led by private firms. Despite NASA's long dominance of the space industry, the FAA has in fact been responsible for licensing and regulating private entities engaged in commercial space travel. According to a fact sheet published by the agency, its Commercial Space Transportation (AST) office has licensed over 220 launches — including commercial launches by SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing (Williams, 2014).

The license assessment process involves environmental, public safety, foreign policy, and national security reviews, as well as insurance requirements. In anticipation of a future commercial spaceflight industry, the FAA has begun issuing experimental permits rather than full licenses for launches and re-entries involving reusable rockets intended for sub-orbital flight. The FAA's framework document assumes that these space vehicles will remain in Earth's orbit for a maximum of two weeks and will be capable of returning to Earth within one calendar day if necessary (Williams, 2014).

It is important to note that orbital voyages and docking maneuvers, flights lasting more than two weeks, extravehicular activities, and missions beyond Earth's orbit are not directly addressed in the framework document. Furthermore, while commercial human spaceflight is moving forward, it is not yet a common reality. The recommended practices focus on the safety of human occupants rather than mission assurance or broader public safety. The framework offers recommendations to commercial spacecraft manufacturers and spaceflight providers regarding operations, design, and manufacturing. Notably, despite being published at a time when space tourism is growing in popularity, the recommended practices do not carry any statutory or regulatory authority (Williams, 2014).

Space Tourism: History, Risks, and Key Players

Trends are changing and new forms of spaceflight are emerging. The year 2001 ushered in a new era of space tourism when Dennis Tito, a wealthy Californian, became the first paying passenger on a commercial space flight (Seedhouse, 2014). Tito paid twenty million dollars to fly aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TM-32, through an arrangement between the American firm Space Adventures and MirCorp, the Russian company then operating the Mir space station. Many others have since followed in Tito's footsteps, including Mark Shuttleworth, a South African technology magnate; Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American businesswoman; and Gregory Olsen, an American entrepreneur, among other wealthy individuals (Seedhouse, 2014). Given the orbital nature of these flights, all space tourists were required to undergo rigorous training alongside professional astronauts in preparation for their missions (Seo, n.d.).

To characterize these missions as the dawn of a true "Age of Space Tourism," however, would be an overstatement. Space has certainly returned to the top of the global policy agenda — particularly on the commercial side — but one must ask: why has this taken more than four decades, and why do only three nations (the United States, Russia, and Japan) appear to have demonstrated the capability of reliably putting humans in space? And why has none of these countries commercially and sustainably promoted space travel for ordinary citizens (Sawaya, 2004)?

It would be an understatement to say that space travel remains a risky and dangerous undertaking despite four decades of innovation. Indeed, space travel is the most dangerous mode of transportation. In the United States space program alone, there have been 17 recorded deaths among the 732 people the program has carried to space — a rate of 2,320 fatalities per 100,000 travelers, which is approximately 45,000 times more dangerous than flying in a commercial aircraft. Statistically, roughly two space shuttles have crashed per every 113 launches, representing a failure rate of approximately 1.8% (Sawaya, 2004).

These statistics would be wholly unacceptable in commercial aviation, which experiences only 0.4 accidents per 100,000 departures per year across the continental United States and its territories. In other words, space travel — however desirable — is presently far too dangerous to develop into a mainstream commercial tourism activity. It is even more dangerous than extreme sports such as skydiving or scuba diving (Sawaya, 2004).

In 2004, the federal government enacted the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) to mandate the FAA to regulate the safety of occupants in commercial spaceflights within the United States. Under the CSLAA, every commercial space launch, landing, and operation is attended and reviewed by FAA officials; all spaceflight participants are taken through a written informed consent process in which they are advised of the potential risks during launch and re-entry; and the safety record and failure rate of the launch site is explained to participants (Seedhouse, 2014).

The private space travel industry is witnessing a growing number of participants drawn by the profitable potential of space tourism. Key players include Elon Musk and Paul Allen (SpaceX), Burt Rutan (Scaled Composites), Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), the Ansari family (Ansari X Prize), Davis Thompson (Orbital Sciences), and Bob Bigelow (Bigelow Aerospace) (Fox, 2010; Gerbis, 2012).