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In my lifetime, I believe that the greatest symbol of American exceptionalism has been NASA, the United States space program, and the American flag that waves (in a manner of speaking) over the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon. In an age when anti-American, anti-imperialist sentiment was building steam, America may not have been universally loved, but it was universally respected. In a rickety vessel that now seems more primitive than the boats in which Columbus sailed the Atlantic, three Americans blasted off, crossed an empty void, landed on a new world and, just to show off, televised the whole thing. And the reaction of the whole world to this incredible spectacle was: “well, of course it is the Americans.”
My father was living in Africa at the time and that was most people’s exact reaction. Only the Americans could pull something like that off and have the savvy to put it on television.
I’d like to believe that Republicans are fully on-board with private space, but the truth is that NASA is a large employer in a number of southern states, and Republican politicians in those states are doing everything they can to protect NASA’s turf and those jobs, even if it means turning their back on the free market.
Have a look at who is pushing for the Space Launch System, a hugely expensive rocket program that is likely to be obsolete before it ever flies, and which can’t hope to compete on cost or availability against SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy or the other heavy lifters that are in private development. What it will do, however, is put pressure on NASA to fly its missions on SLS instead of contracting them out, which will be a blow to the private space companies.
One of the reasons SLS can’t compete is because it has been mandated to use as many shuttle parts as possible, for the sole reason of keeping open the factories making those parts. Some of those Senators even want to divert funds away from the wildly successful commercial programs to fund this white elephant.
It’s shameful, and Republicans are just as much to blame as Democrats – or even more so.
So you think that a space tourism company that fails to exercise reasonable care to protect the lives of its customers should pay nothing if the company’s carelessness kills those customers?
Looking at your skydiving example: What if the company includes a parachute, but fails to check the lines, so the customer falls to his death? What if the company improperly packs the parachute so that it doesn’t open at all? Do they get off the hook?
As an additional issue: why can’t the space tourism industry handle the question as the skydiving industry (apparently) does? That is, a space tourism company could use the same type of release form as a skydiving company. This option promotes liberty of contract, by the way — leaving the company and the customer free to allocate risk between them — unlike the federal law in question, which mandates the type of one-size-fits-all “solution” that Conservatives normally oppose.
FYI, as a policy matter, the details may vary from state to state, but the general rule is that a release is effective to eliminate liability for “ordinary” negligence but is not effective to eliminate liability for “gross” negligence. Which generally leaves people litigating anyway about whether the negligence was “gross” or not.
We lawyers take a lot of abuse. But the principle that people (and companies) should pay for damage caused by their carelessness is a good one.
IMHO, private space enterprises will be the wave of the future – that is, until they become highly successful, then the government will step in and take over.
I agree with the original premise of the post – the space program was the best way the U.S. showed its exceptionalism, which is precisely why Obama has reduced NASA to muslim outreach . . .
I certainly don’t think that private space companies should be free from liability. It is hard to argue that anything here is black and white. The most stringent law will leave loopholes through which companies will escape liability and the most liberal law will still permit lawsuits if the negligence is egregious enough.
So I think it is just a matter of degree and while I too recognize that lawyers do, sometimes, protect individual rights when large private or public entities trample on them, My sympathies are often with those who oppose the ambulance chasers and anyone (like the AAJ spokeswoman) who argues that the private space travel industry should be treated the same as the commercial airline industry is patently absurd.
While I agree that an entity should be liable for gross negligence, we need only to look at the medical field to see the results of aggressive lawyers vs. medical practitioners. America went from the best medical care in the world and at affordable prices to Obama Care as a direct result of litigation and patients wanting to win a “Legal Lottery.” We have all seen dozens of TV ads from law firms telling us to call “1-800-SUE-DOCS” to get some of the millions of dollars “you deserve.” And this was good for medicine how? Same thing goes for these space pioneering companies.
To AP’s point, doesn’t an exemption for one industry effectively validate the norm of excessive liability and frivolous lawsuits in other industries?
This seems similar to both Republicans and Democrats using the national income tax to buy votes with tax exemptions and other tax incentives. The problem isn’t who gets the slack and who doesn’t. The problem is that politicians are meddling at all.
Here is H.R. 2262, the SPACE Act of 2015.
This is not about exempting the commercial space flight industry from liability. Spaceflight participants will be required to sign an acknowledgement of the risks they are undertaking, precisely as participants in extreme sports or adventure tourism do today. The key provision of the bill is extending the “learning period” during which commercial space companies are allowed to operate without the kind of heavy-handed top-down regulation by the FAA which is currently applied to civil aviation. The FAA will retain the power to regulate the industry to avoid third party damages (for example, those caused by a malfunctioning vehicle crashing into somebody’s house outside the launch site).
The reason for the learning period is simply that we don’t have sufficient experience with commercial passenger space operations—suborbital or orbital—to do the kind of detailed technical certification done for airliners. There was a similar learning period between when aircraft started carrying paying passengers and when certification was imposed (although it wasn’t called that: in that much less risk-averse age, people simply went ahead and did things without the government’s being involved).
Imposing civil aviation-like certification at this early stage of evolution of the industry would stop innovation in its tracks and increase the cost of entry to the market to such an extent that many potential competitors would be unable to enter it.
Besides, at this early stage, we’re talking about very pricey tickets indeed, sold to well-heeled people who are well aware of the risks. If the U.S. cuts off this home-grown innovative industry at the ankles, those customers will have no problems whatsoever buying a ticket to a spaceport in the Caribbean or Dubai rather than one in the U.S., and the companies pioneering this industry will take their jobs and technology offshore.
After 17 years as a civil litigation lawyer — on both sides — I do not believe in the “frivolous lawsuit” argument as I once did. As an example, one of my motivations in going to law school was outrage over the famous (infamous?) $1-million-plus verdict against McDonald’s over a spilled cup of hot coffee. But then I learned more about the case. Here’s what I recall.
McDonald’s kept its coffee about 5-10 degrees (F) higher than the competition. It was that 5-10 degrees that made a difference between a minor scald and a major burn. McDonald’s did marketing studies and determined that many customers chose McD’s for breakfast because the coffee was so hot. They decided that it would be cheaper to just pay the claims of the burn victims, rather than lose the business of the customers who liked super-hot coffee.
Now on the one hand, you might think that McD’s decision was economically efficient — the revealed preference of the super-hot-coffee drinkers was worth more than the (quite severe) burns that occasionally occur. But the jury didn’t see it that way, and I can understand their perspective. Also, I very much doubt that most people knew the real danger of a slightly hotter cup of coffee.
Actually, by now that flag’s been bleached completely white.
So, America is waving a white flag on the moon.
Irony?
Good point. The other space-faring country at the time would have kept the mission top secret.
I had the great good fortune to meet James Lovell. I blubbered like a fool.
I remember the fear when MLK was shot, remembered running to my room to pray when RFK was shot, but I profoudly recall every moment of watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Would that that achievement were not the pinnacle of American exceptionalism.
Our son’s middle name is Neil. Enough said.
Evidence of the loss and lack of personal responsibility. One gets $1M for being stupid? For not knowing that hot coffee is hot. Gimme a break.
Maybe we should return to the moon and see for ourselves. Maybe plant a few more flags…
“FYI, as a policy matter, the details may vary from state to state, but the general rule is that a release is effective to eliminate liability for “ordinary” negligence but is not effective to eliminate liability for “gross” negligence. Which generally leaves people litigating anyway about whether the negligence was “gross” or not.”
Except a private space company with deep pockets is left explaining why the widow of a man who was incinerated in a fiery explosion, blasted to smithereens, shouldn’t get a pile of money from those richy-rich businessmen. The kids who want to go to college and have to grow up without Daddy! They couldn’t even bury him in a proper funeral because his body was barbequed at high altitude!
We know how that works out.
I’m not sure this needs to be the case if the legal structure is worked out carefully. According to AdventureStats.com, between 1922 and 2006 (data for later years are not available on their site) 10094 people attempted to reach the summit of Mount Everest and 207 died in the attempt, for a fatality rate of 2.05%. This is comparable to the probability of dying on a Space Shuttle mission, which had 14 fatalities for a total of 600 seats flown (note that since numerous people flew on multiple missions, the fatality rate per person who flew on the shuttle was higher); the fatality probability per seat is the probability that a given person, flying on a given mission, would have of dying.
If commercial space ventures have a fatality rate anything remotely approaching that of Everest climbers or Space Shuttle crew, their ventures will be financially disastrous even if they were immune from liability lawsuits. Why? Because almost every plausible cause of death among passengers would also involve loss of the vehicle, and operating a vehicle which is lost at a rate comparable to the Shuttle (around 1.5% loss of vehicle per launch) would be financially ruinous to any private venture.
I am confident those financing commercial space ventures have thoroughly explored how they can protect themselves against liability suits just as companies providing expeditions to climb Everest do. But in any case their designs will, necessarily, have to be enormously less likely to kill the customers than Everest expeditions.
Sounds like the
pod peoplelawyers have an effective indoctrination process and you have been fully assimilated…This is completely off-topic, and I apologize, but since this incident happened in my hometown, I must respond.
The jurors meant to send McDonald’s a message, that treating people’s injuries as a dollars-and-cents metric was not acceptable. So they deliberately priced the award ($12 million) at two orders of magnitude above the value McD’s lawyers and insurance company felt was “acceptable”. (Said value came out during the trial.)
The message was sent.
And then the judge adjusted the award down to $400,000, which is all the woman suing got (and probably 80% of that went to her lawyers.
I don’t think that was an unreasonable outcome, actually.
Wow! And under the hard radiation those lander stages and moon buggies have mutated into Transformers(TM)! This is America! We don’t need to go to space anymore, we’ve been doing that on entertainment centers for over a decade! Did you hear about the virtual reality headset porn features? We ain’t going nowhere.
Except that
(a) people who die on Everest usually do so as a result of exposure, storms, avalanches, or lack of oxygen; people who die on space shuttles do so as a result of things more directly attributable to the negligence of the space company; and
(b) Everest companies can base themselves out of a country that isn’t America, which lends itself to a whole different layer of legal wrangling.
I’m entirely unclear as to why you used Everest expeditions as a baseline comparison, when it seems as if the relevant legal issues are quite different. I can explain to a lay jury why death by exposure isn’t the fault of the expedition company; what I can’t do is to explain to a lay jury why that massive KABOOM! wasn’t the result of the negligence of the people who made and operated the spacecraft.
A better comparison would be the very successfull experimental aircraft program, which allows you to build and fly your own aircraft, and even carry passengers. The regulatory requirements are minimal, and there are restrictions around commercial use and disclosure of the experimental nature of the aircraft, but that program has been working very well for decades. There’s no reason a spaceflight version of that cannot suffice for a long time.