With less than six months to go before a limitation on regulating U.S. commercial human spaceflight companies expires, industry and government officials have yet to find agreement on whether to extend the current arrangement or, if not, how to replace it. Much of the discussion at a daylong meeting of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) here April 1 dealt with what many in the industry call the "learning period" that limits the FAA's ability to regulate commercial human spaceflight. A provision of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 restricts the FAA's ability to issue commercial spaceflight safety regulations except in cases of serious accidents or other high-risk incidents. The intent of the restriction was to allow companies to develop flight experience that could then be used as the basis for regulations.
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