The head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight office expects current restrictions on regulations of the safety of spaceflight participants to be extended.
Virgin Galactic proved pretty well that informed consent isn’t really sufficient, because there are too many unknown unknowns for them to properly inform someone. They’re on a good streak lately, but so was Blue Origin before their uncrewed abort last September that still has New Sheppard grounded. SpaceX has been the aberration so far, and seems to handle Dragon much more rigorously than Starship, and would have to be considered the LEO crew flight experts at this point, but they also lost rockets pretty well into Falcon 9’s operational life.
I don’t know what the right answer is, and I’m guessing a massive requirement list wouldn’t do anything to help newcomers. This is a tough one.
Virgin Galactic proved pretty well that informed consent isn’t really sufficient, because there are too many unknown unknowns for them to properly inform someone. They’re on a good streak lately, but so was Blue Origin before their uncrewed abort last September that still has New Sheppard grounded. SpaceX has been the aberration so far, and seems to handle Dragon much more rigorously than Starship, and would have to be considered the LEO crew flight experts at this point, but they also lost rockets pretty well into Falcon 9’s operational life.
I don’t know what the right answer is, and I’m guessing a massive requirement list wouldn’t do anything to help newcomers. This is a tough one.