Private cargo-carrying spacecraft? No problem, but put people on commercial flights and things get messy. Just as NASA set the date for SpaceX's first official trip to the International Space Station, the firm's home state of California passed a law lightening company responsibility for the safety of future passengers.
No private space firm yet sends crewed flights to space, but that is the plan. The new law treats spaceflight rather like sky-diving, requiring future travellers to give "informed consent". They agree not to sue the company they fly with if they're injured or killed in the process.
California is the last of the states hosting major contenders in the commercial space race to pass such a law, trailing Virginia, home to Orbital Sciences, New Mexico (Virgin Galactic), and Texas (Blue Origin), which have already done so.
"California's the last of the really prominent, big ones that's to come," says Matthew Schaefer, a space law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "All those other states as well as California already have the ground infrastructure in place. This is assisting in the legal infrastructure, to help incentivize private human spaceflight launching from that state."
Hardy tourists
The laws may make a state more attractive to space businesses, says Diane Howard, a professor of space law at McGill University in Canada, but without statistics on the safety of commercial flights, travellers sign away their right to sue blindly, she says. "What exactly are you informing them of? You don't know how dangerous it is."
Hardy space tourists may not care: Virgin Galactic, which plans to launch its first crewed flight in 2013, has a roster of passengers who have signed consent agreements.
Having these laws on the books in the industry's infancy won't keep private spaceflight from eventually becoming as routine as plane travel. If spaceflights really take off, the regulatory system will evolve with it, Shaefer says.
"Once we get to 1000 flights a day for point-to-point suborbital travel, New York to Tokyo in an hour and a half or whatever, then you may need a different regulatory structure," he says.
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