UNTIL now, the only people with a realistic hope of becoming 鈥渟pace tourists鈥� have been multimillionaires who can afford to spend months training for a flight on a Russian .
That is likely to change dramatically in coming years. Last month Falcon 1, built by Californian company , became the first privately built rocket to enter Earth orbit, and the struck a deal with to allow scientists to monitor climate change from its spacecraft. Civilian spaceflight, it seems, is firmly on the horizon (see 鈥淪pace flight into a legal black hole鈥�).
Yet amid the excitement and expectation, one word keeps popping up: safety. The fact that there are no globally enforceable safety rules for spacecraft, as there are for ships and aircraft, has some people worried. Strangely, it does not seem to worry the , which believes that burdening civilian space flight with onerous safety regulations would put a brake on innovation. Consider the , it argues: aviation safety was not regulated until a couple of decades after they took to the air, which allowed time for the technology to evolve into the basic form that modern aircraft use.
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Nevertheless, campaigners are lobbying the UN to create minimum safety standards for civilian spacecraft. This makes good sense. It should be possible to set standards that provide some protection for customers while still allowing innovation. No one wants to stifle creativity, but the one thing guaranteed to stop the space tourism industry in its tracks would be a tragic and avoidable accident.