What Will the SpaceShipTwo Crash Mean for Commercial Space Flight Regulation?
The crash of a test flight of billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, which cost the life of one, riveted many around the globe on Friday afternoon.
Branson headed to the California site, tweeting, “Thoughts with all @virgingalactic & Scaled, thanks for all your messages of support. I’m flying to Mojave immediately to be with the team.”
An investigation will show what happened. The LA Times noted the reawakening to how dangerous these ventures can be. Peopled were lulled into thinking the Virgin craft looked safer than a rocket, but, as an analyst noted, “People will now realize this is space travel…and you’re getting into a rocket.”
We should be careful that governmental responses do not aggravate risks in the future, however. I discussed some of these concerns in a Forbes column a couple years ago about keeping regulators “earthbound”:
…No one should look at these [low-earth orbit flights] as joyrides or tinkering; rather, they lay the groundwork for humanity’s next evolution in transportation, even if one is skeptical (as I am) about manned flights to asteroids or Mars. Future generations’ ability to deliver goods or hop from New York to Tokyo or Sydney in the time it takes to ride the D.C. Metro today could utterly change the world yet again…
…Commercial space’s real hurdle, if it can avoid entangling alliances with government, is dealing with inevitable dangers in a grown-up way by fostering the right risk-management institutions.
Basically, industries that don’t exist yet aren’t over-regulated yet, and thus have the potential to create extraordinary wealth. We must lay the groundwork for the fundamental risk-management institutions that enhance safety better than tossing everything to regulators. …
Over-regulation can easily cripple this industry while making it more risky. Political “regulation” can undermine actual regulation and governance … and hobble the commercial space industry for generations to come.
…Don’t call it “self-regulation” though; It is a misnomer in free markets since business partners and suppliers, investors, insurance companies and Wall Street all regulate and discipline errant behavior. …
Regulators also likely will attempt to “help” the industry with waivers of liability (or conversely, undermine the ability to contract away liability like the waiver I had to sign to fly a powered parachute). Taking that path means the commercial space industry future shall be one of regulation of the kind that doesn’t actually regulate and discipline and that hampers progress, and leaves us with a few big players who capture the regulators. …
…New kinds of business insurance/liability products as well as safety engineering itself should emerge more aggressively…
A Washington Post story noted that the first colonists of Mars would likely agree to never return — that they’d remain as permanent settlers. This represents the extreme case, but we can handle it. Still, the legal institutions required to allow someone to contract to embark on such a trip and likely fatal endeavor seem not to exist and need to be bolstered. No one wants any injury whatsover, and we certainly will not tolerate what society used to withstand in the late 1890s when one lineman in two were killed on the job. But we can cope with and allow adventure and the right to explore new frontiers.
Today was a reminder that when innovators and the aspirational among us raise the bar, danger is often nearby.