Safekeeping (4/5/23)

Good morning. Three crew members aboard the ISS will have an early wake up call tomorrow to move a Soyuz capsule to a new parking spot, NASA announced Tuesday. When we’re out searching for a new spot before the sun is up, it’s usually to avoid a ticket or monthly street sweeping. The astronauts, however, are making room for a cargo resupply mission launching later this year.

In today's edition:🦺 Safety in space🚀 Starship launch rumors💰 The term sheet

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.

RAND Releases Space Tourism Regulations Report

A moratorium on regulating human commercial spaceflight—aka space tourism—is set to expire in October, and the folks at the FAA are at a crossroads: to renew or not to renew?

In a report published this week by RAND, researchers determined that the commercial human spaceflight industry has progressed far enough that it’s time for the FAA to allow the moratorium to expire and start imposing certain regulations on the industry.

Backing up…In 2015, Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), which was intended to spur on innovation and competition in the nascent commercial space industry. To encourage industry to begin spaceflight operations, the CSLCA prohibited the government from introducing additional safety regulations until Oct. 2023.

• Under that moratorium, the FAA is not allowed to introduce regulations regarding the safety of human passengers to space unless a component of that flight injures or nearly injures someone.

• By October, the FAA will need to decide whether the industry has grown up enough to be ready for regulation—in which case, the moratorium should be allowed to expire—or whether it still has more maturing to do.

Assessing readiness

In response to a call in the CSLCA, the FAA contracted RAND to analyze the commercial spaceflight industry to determine whether, and to what extent, the industry could be ready for formal government regulation.

The team’s methodology included diving into the existing literature on regulations and voluntary consensus standards to which the space industry already holds itself accountable, as well as conducting interviews with experts across civil, military, and commercial space.

The findings: In general, the research team had trouble lining up commercial spaceflight industry standards with the benchmarks it has previously used for fields like the energy industry. Still, they shared some findings, including:

1. The team found that 20 voluntary standards for human spaceflight have been created across several industry groups, but that the industry as a whole has not committed to following them.

2. The FAA has suggested a long list of indicators to assess the readiness of the commercial industry, including questions about the reason people want to buy tickets to space, the size of the tourism industry, and the extent to which standards have been developed. Most people interviewed, though, thought these indicators were vague and unhelpful—”perhaps deliberately so,” the report notes.

3. Based on its research and analysis of previous reports by Congress and outside groups, the team found that “the commercial space industry should transition to a safety framework that includes the opportunity for federal regulations to be issued.”

RAND’s recommendations: The team landed somewhere in the middle of two extremes when it comes to how far the FAA should go in its newfound ability to regulate the human spaceflight industry. The analysts call this a “glide path,” which would end the overarching moratorium but keep it going for a shortlist of selected areas.

Most of the people interviewed, the report states, didn’t agree that a binary answer—regulate or don’t regulate—suits the whole space tourism industry as it stands right now. Data sharing, for example, makes more sense to regulate right now than nascent tech that’s still in development.

In the end, the research team made five recommendations:

1. Allow the moratorium to end in October as currently planned

2. Allot enough funding to the FAA to effectively develop new regulations

3. Proceed with Space Aerospace Rulemaking Committees

4. Continue to develop voluntary consensus standards across the industry

5. Consider limited informal rulemaking

SpaceX May Launch Starship as Early as Next Week

The countdown has begun for the maiden orbital flight of SpaceX's Starship.

SpaceX has notified the FAA that they are targeting April 10 for Starship’s orbital flight, with April 11 and April 12 as backup dates. On Tuesday, Elon Musk further stoked excitement and seemingly confirmed the date by “liking” three tweets regarding an April 10 Starship launch.

Chance of delay: Despite the anticipation, it’s likely the date could slip a couple of days, or even weeks, as SpaceX has yet to receive final FAA launch approval. Other factors that could delay the flight date include a last-minute civil litigation court injunction and, of course, day-of scrubs.

Nonetheless, SpaceX has rolled the Starship SN24 to its pad in Boca Chica, TX, Ars Technica reported, and is undergoing its final preparations to launch as soon as it receives the final go-ahead.

Great expectations: Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle. The fully-reusable rocket stands nearly 400 feet tall and will be capable of delivering 150 tons to orbit.

Lots of hope will be riding on board the inaugural orbital flight. The rocket is expected to drastically reduce the cost of launch in the industry while also playing an integral role in NASA’s return to the Moon as the primary lunar lander for the Artemis program.

Sponsored

The OS for spacecraft and complex operations

Are your spacecraft testing and ops procedures stuck on documents, spreadsheets, and wikis?

Are you still using paper checklists or Confluence pages for your procedures?

Time to join the revolution with Epsilon3.

Epsilon3 modernizes space missions and complex engineering and testing by building the industry standard of operational software.

They produce a web-based platform for managing complex spacecraft/aerospace operational and testing procedures that provides coordination, assurance, and risk reduction. The top-notch team came from Northrop, NASA, Google, and SpaceX, where they ran operations to bring American astronauts to the ISS.

Innovate reliably, securely, at speed and scale. Let Epsilon3's platform worry about managing complex operational procedures, saving you time and reducing errors.

Request a demo on Epsilon3's website to learn more. (Or if you’re a software engineer, apply to join their team.)

In Other News

• Deloitte opened a space practice to advise companies “on the full possibilities of space.”

• Payload talked with Artemis astronaut Christina Hammock Koch about her excitement for the lunar mission, how she told her husband she had been selected, and the importance of music in space.

• NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter makes history in its 49th flight on Mars.

• Astronauts on future long-duration missions could eat 3D-printed food.

• Kenya will launch its first operational satellite next week.

• One upgraded Starlink satellite has fallen out of orbit.

• More than two dozen orgs agreed to best practices in orbit to prioritize space sustainability and prevent debris.

• Correction: Sirisha Bandla is still a VP at Virgin Galactic in addition to her new role as chair of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

The View from Europe

ESA astronaut candidates began their 12-month training this week at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany.