SPACE TOURISM Safety is a top concern

Some believe the goals of space tourism are being set a little high.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
MIAMI -- Please be sure that your personal items are securely stowed, your seat backs and tray tables are in the upright and locked position, your helmets are sealed, your wills have been filed and your legal waivers are signed.
Now that private spaceships have loosened the atmospheric bonds and space tourism appears to be in our future, new legal, regulatory and philosophical frontiers suddenly loom on the horizon.
One issue: To what extent should high-flying adventurers be warned of the risks?
"You need a waiver that basically says, 'I'm a nut and I deserve to die, and my parents and my family can't sue anybody,'" said Rick Tumlinson, a founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, which supports private space travel under "common sense" regulations that assign most of the risk to space voyagers.
A second issue: Who will protect other earthlings -- known in the space tourism industry as "the uninvolved" -- from the occasional exploding, falling rocket ship?
On the case
A little-known space transportation branch of the Federal Aviation Administration is on the case, studying a full range of nettlesome safety, legal and regulatory issues.
"We are responsible for ensuring the protection, the safety, of the uninvolved public on the ground," said Patti Grace Smith, the FAA's associate administrator for commercial space transportation. "We will be involved in all of the compliance requirements" relating to safety.
Tumlinson and other semi-free marketers believe the nascent space tourism industry quickly will see the practical value of running the safest possible operation.
"If the rocket guys keep killing their customers," he said, "people will stop flying them."
At the same time, spaceflight advocates from Florida to California are positioning themselves to land a piece of the action.
"Space tourism is growing by leaps and bounds," said former NASA astronaut Winston Scott, a Miami native and executive director of the Florida Space Authority. "Where better to have that growth than here in Florida, where we have space [flight experience] and we have tourism?"
"This is the next step. We're in on the ground floor to make it happen."
Successful venture
All of this flows in the jet stream created by SpaceShipOne, the privately built rocket plane that snared a $10 million prize earlier this month by carrying a human into space twice within two weeks, an achievement that has eluded any spaceship built by NASA.
That ignited a wave of interest in private space travel, including a vow by British airline mogul Richard Branson to launch Virgin Galactic, a "spaceline" that would rocket passengers to brief suborbital hops -- with weightlessness and all the joys and challenges of spaceflight -- by 2007.
Many believe that goal is overly optimistic, and fares could be around $200,000. Still, preliminary market studies suggest that tens of thousands of people could be interested, and experts expect fares to fall rapidly.
The spaceflight package could include training, contact with NASA-trained astronauts, flight simulations, space-themed barf bags, whatever.
A Fort Lauderdale-based company, Zero Gravity Corp., already offers FAA-approved parabolic, weightless flights aboard a modified Boeing 727 for tourists and other adventure seekers. The cost: $2,950 per person.
Millionaires Dennis Tito of California and Mark Shuttleworth of South Africa paid up to $20 million each to hitch rides aboard Russian rockets to the international space station.
"Everybody is curious about what it is like to fly in space, the weightlessness," Scott said.
"You'll see people on vacation, people looking for thrill rides, people who want to do research," he added.
Risks
Which raises the issues of safety, regulation and liability.
Some engineers and statisticians calculated that NASA's space shuttle was likely to suffer one catastrophic failure in every 78 flights. Two shuttles -- Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 -- have been lost.