REASON: Do you see the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act as a step in the right direction?
BR: Well, it didn't address the problem that I'm discussing, getting an FAA acceptance of the safety of passengers. It doesn't address that. However, everything else in it is positive, there's nothing negative in it. It does address asking FAA to develop an experimental research category for launch licenses. However, it's not specific and we think it needs to be more specific to force FAA to regulate these tests more like airplane research rather than like they did our program.
The license process for our program actually decreased safety and it involved an enormous amount of monitoring. It forced our people to defend the product where our safety policy is to never defend it, but always question the safety. We have to get that changed.
REASON: How did the process compromise safety?
BR: We have, I think the count now is 39, new types—new airplanes from scratch, in 30 years. We have yet to injure a pilot. We've had things like landing gear failure, but we've never had a real accident. And that's a record that no one has come close to, and we maintain that a major reason we have a superb record is our safety policy, that we always require of, not just people building it, but those designing, flying, and testing it. But to never, ever put themselves in a position where they defend the safety. Once they do, you're screwed.
We always want them in a mode in which they question the safety. If you're always questioning it, you can turn around and find something better and immediately incorporate it. For example, if you had turned in last week a report to a government agency in which you've told them the product, as it is, is safe, if you discover something better next week, you have two choices.
One, you can go an write an addendum to that report and essentially tell the government, that, gee, I was wrong last week, it wasn't the safest that it can be, and now it is because I've discovered this new thing. And then you'll find yourself debating that with them and losing your credibility with them. We make changes almost every day when we're in a research mode. So you can see you get into this big back and forth in which they see you making changes after you defend the safety to them. Now the solution there is to never tell anybody that it's safe, but always question it, which then allows you to immediately incorporate safety features and go on. And, instead of firing somebody who designed something unsafe, you reward whoever found a better way and congratulate him.
The other choice that people have is they'll see something safer and they'll realize they just told the government that it was safe last week. And then they make the decision that, well, you know, last week's configuration—it's safe enough. Another thing too is that we're a small company. We don't have a big safety department that works with the government regulators. We have the people that are there testing the product and we can only afford to have the team that's there. And now we get our team, instead of focusing on the job of making it as safe as possible, they're distracted to write reports and provide data for the government.
Another thing too is it forced us into flying trajectories and glide paths back over the airport that weren't the safest ones to fly because they, the government, was only interested in the best safety for people on the ground. Now if you look at it, for many decades, you go back to the 40s and you find that all the research flight testing done up here in this desert, there's been hundreds of accidents with research airplanes, but nobody's ever been hurt on the ground. So why would you compromise the safety of the test pilot in order to make it more safe for people on the ground?
REASON: Let me read you something from a recent interview in Wired magazine with [then NASA Administrator] Sean O'Keefe. He's addressing the SpaceShipOne launch, and says yes it was amazing, “but let's put this in a relative context. Mike Melville went half the altitude that Alan Shepard did, for a fraction of the amount of time, did it 40 years later, and flew in a plastic airplane fueled by laughing gas. From a technical standpoint, this was a modest objective, except for one major point: They did it themselves. It's like a bunch of guys doing this in their garage.”
BR: And what he didn't say is that we developed three new breakthrough technologies which will allow us immediately to launch a commercial spaceline industry in which people can fly at the same safety level of the early airlines. What Alan Shepard flew in was an expendable booster with a parachute recovery, and for 44 years of NASA manned space flight, they have not made significant improvements in concepts that will allow safe access to space.
REASON: For those interested in space policy, it seems like there were two camps when the question was—what's the biggest barrier to private space exploration? Some people said it was a regulatory, government-imposed barrier, and others said it was a perception barrier, that people could not imagine a small group of people doing what you did. How do you see it?
BR: People may interpret the regulatory barrier as the government won't let you fly something that is safe enough to fly. That's what people may think the regulatory barrier is, and I want to make it very clear that that's not my opinion at all, and this is true with airplanes, too. The regulations for light planes, which is called Part 23, there isn't anything there [that doesn't let] you fly something that otherwise should be safe. In fact, if you make an airplane that just barely makes Part 23, it'll be a lousy airplane that in my opinion is not very safe.
But it's a process that [involves] working with na�ve, and sometimes inexperienced, regulators who won't make a quick decision, so it drags your program out. I don't see anything in the regulatory rules that's restrictive. I think it's too early to regulate because they don't know what new ideas will come out. For example, if you assume that something is like a V-2 Rocket or something is like a Mercury Redstone, you can regulate that, and they have been regulating things like that for 10 years under the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. However, for them to apply those rules for something that flies to space like an airplane does not work. So they can't sit down and write regulatory rules for things that will happen in the future because you can't know what's going to happen in the future.
I have a solution for that, and that's what I'm working on right now. The developer himself [should] define the testing that is needed for his system to show that it is safe, and he negotiates that test plan with the FAA, and they approve the fact that he did it. I think that it's the only way to do it. You can't regulate spaceships like you can airplanes because every one of them is different.
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