Barely a week after federal safety watchdogs revealed persistently lax government oversight of the burgeoning space-tourism industry, the Senate voted to extend the current regulatory framework for at least five more years.
Passed unanimously on Tuesday, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act aims to encourage private space ventures by providing certainty regarding insurance liability and federal regulation.
The legislation calls for eliminating “duplicative requirements and approvals for commercial launch and re-entry operations,” while instructing officials at the Transportation Department and the Federal Aviation Administration to continue the twin roles of regulating and promoting the industry.
Congress decades ago decided that other FAA offices in charge of regulating airline safety shouldn’t simultaneously be responsible for promoting the industry.
The bill also effectively bars substantially tighter FAA safety rules until at least 2020, when a so-called regulatory “learning period” would expire. The current learning period—a Congressionally imposed moratorium on formal regulations to protect crew or passengers on such vehicles—is slated to end Sept. 30 unless the updated bill becomes law.
In addition, Congress extended existing insurance liability provisions and indemnity protections for the industry, with some modifications.
On July 28, accident investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board criticized the FAA’s implementation of existing regulations, asserting that agency officials failed to provide adequate guidance on human factors to the industry. The safety board also faulted the FAA’s leadership for keeping its staff from directly asking applicants about technical details of the launch vehicles they are responsible for overseeing.
The NTSB identified lax FAA oversight as an ancillary factor to the much-publicized 2014 crash of an experimental rocket ship dubbed SpaceShip Two, backed by billionaire British entrepreneur Richard Branson’s closely held Virgin Galactic LLC. The co-pilot died after he mistakenly unlocked a movable part of the tail at the wrong time, breaking the vehicle apart at an altitude of 10 miles.
The FAA last week said it was reviewing the NTSB’s recommendations to tighten various regulatory procedures. More broadly, the agency defended its record by emphasizing “it is prohibited from regulating crew safety,” and Congress explicitly determined the agency’s responsibilities relate “to only protecting the safety of the uninvolved public and property” in case of an accident or launch failure.
The Senate bill doesn’t change that. If anything, it urges less regulation in the future. Senators approved language emphasizing continued reliance on “voluntary consensus standards” to protect crews, government astronauts and prospective spaceflight passengers. Another section of the bill includes language streamlining the permitting process in a manner long advocated by Virgin Galactic.
The bill also locks in U.S. support for continued operation of the international space station through 2024.
After passage, Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee on space, issued a statement saying the bill “carried President Reagan’s torch forward” by demonstrating U.S. commitment to “a strong commercial space sector.”
Seven days earlier, the NTSB released hundreds of pages of investigative documents—along with summaries and transcripts of staff interviews with FAA officials—highlighting systemic oversight shortcomings by the agency. The data also revealed questionable regulatory decisions and unusually favorable FAA management treatment of companies seeking experimental launch permits.
The documents, among other things, revealed that two safety experts told the NTSB that leaders of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation failed to act on years of warnings from them about the lack of regulatory compliance by the backers of SpaceShip Two. Supervisors turned down offers from one of the experts to help review outstanding compliance issues, according to interview summaries released by the NTSB. The employee subsequently refused to sign off on extending SpaceShip Two’s experimental launch permits.
After last week’s public NTSB meeting, Scaled Composites—a unit of Northrop Grumman Corp. and the partner of Virgin Galactic that held the experimental launch permits—said it “already made changes in the wake of the accident to further enhance safety.” The company, which told the safety board in an earlier submission that it never requested any waiver, also said in last week’s statement that it will continue to look for additional ways to improve procedures.
An FAA supervisor told the safety board it wasn’t unusual for senior officials of the FAA’s commercial space office to decide, on their own, to prepare and approve waivers even without receiving any such request from an applicant.
According to an interview transcript released by the NTSB, FAA manager Randy Repcheck explained that when the agency received an application for a license or permit that didn’t meet requirements, the FAA often would deem it incomplete and consider it “tantamount to applying for a waiver.”
A centerpiece of the Senate bill—barring airline-style regulation until at least 2020—faces stiff opposition in the House. In May, lawmakers in the lower chamber passed a version of the bill seeking to extend until 2025, or five years longer than the Senate, the current de facto ban on regulations that would aim to protect crew members. The House version retains authority for the FAA to step in after major accidents.
House Democratic leaders rallied their members to vote against the measure, arguing that the 10-year ban on tougher regulatory measures would conflict with Senate language and threatened to scuttle the entire legislation. The House bill passed largely along partisan lines, so now GOP leaders in both chambers are expected to seek compromise language.
(Published by The Wall Street Journal - August 6, 2015)