You’ve got people who have creative ideas about space tourism.
Now you’ve got all kinds of ideas about mining asteroids, people like Bob Bigelow who wants to set up a motel in space. It wasn’t just what government employees were going to decide and which company they would accept to give a contract to. The only concept of profit before was getting a government contract to do something. Back then that wasn’t the case but we have to make sure now that we don’t have a new limit to how far people can go and what they can do.” It is because we laid the foundation we now have billions of dollars that are being invested by the likes of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Atlantic, you name it, you have a whole bunch of these companies. We just have to make sure that we keep adapting so that you don’t have established regulatory controls and contracts that get in the way of people who have got innovative ideas and new approaches. Before my bill in 2004 the floor was the lid. We’ve got to make sure we don’t again create a false lid on how high people can go in this industry. What more do you advocate the government do to further fuel the private innovation? In fact, my bill was an anti-establishment bill in the sense it was going to change the nature of the game.ĭo you see less resistance from those the entrenched interest? All your big aerospace companies had their long term relationships with the various bureaucracies involved with NASA and the Defense Department and so we didn’t have a lot of support. You have entrenched space companies and you have people with business relationships with the bureaucracy that have already been established. I was told the bill had no chance of passing and we won by just a few votes. I went to see Dennis Tito,” an American businessman and the first space tourist who bought a ride on the Russian space station Mir. I was chairman of the subcommittee on space on the science committee. Not only legal foundation, there wasn’t any policy that we established so that people could invest in space were confident that they weren’t going to establish rules that freeze them out of what they were doing.
I was the author of the Commercial Space Amendments Act of 2004 and during that time period there was very little legal foundation for those people who wanted to do business in space. You have been pushing for ways to encourage investment in private space ventures for a long time. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. POLITICO sat down recently with Rohrabacher, who was first elected in 1988, before a campaign fundraiser in Los Angeles headlined by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Like in the earliest stages of the commercial space industry, he sees continued resistance from entrenched government contractors and bureaucracies: “There is friction big time.” “They have an idea of how to keep costs low because it affects their profit margin, which isn’t the case of government employees and NASA.” “SpaceX and these other companies, when they do something under a government contract they are actually saving the government money,” he says.
0 kommentar(er)
