Office of Commercial Space Transportation
This selection occurred following an interagency competition between the Departments of Commerce and Transportation to be the lead agency.
[3] At the time the Executive Order was signed, the government's means for controlling commercial launches was through a unique application of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).
The DOS letter agreeing to this transfer also stated that the Department of State felt uncomfortable with the use of the "export license" as a means to control commercial launches, and that it believed that a legal authority specifically designed for commercial space launches was preferable.
This letter from the State Department to the Secretary of Transportation persuaded the Reagan administration to change its position regarding the need for legislation, and paved the way for passage of the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984.
[7] Launch companies discovered that insurance rates that NASA and the US Air Force were setting were impossible to meet.
OCST established its reputation within the space community that it could create the hospitable path the industry needed to grow and flourish.
The licensing framework created at that time was modular and designed to handle any type of space vehicle or spacecraft.
The first Office of Commercial Space Transportation regulatory action was a precedent setting payload approval of "cremains", which consisted of human cremated remains enclosed in lipstick style capsules.
From the very beginning it prepared environmental impact statements or assessments that permitted the categorical exclusion of commercial space launches.
Proactively, it approached the National Transportation Safety Board to ensure NTSBs investigators would be prepared in advance of an incident or accident.
As part of an effort to ensure OCST maintained a light regulatory touch, in 1991 OCST Director Stephanie Lee-Myers and associate director for Licensing and Safety, Norman Bowles met with Burt Rutan, pre-eminent air plane designer to get his views on how to avoid over-regulating the commercial launch industry.
Previous studies had demonstrated that the public safety risks from commercial space launches were exceptionally low.
The first 10 years was an era of light touch, and enlightened regulation that would end with the transfer of OCST from the Office of the Secretary of Transportation to the Federal Aviation Administration.
licensed the Mojave Air & Space Port in California to become the first inland commercial spaceport in the country.
[19] Due to this, the United States requires that rocket manufacturers and launchers adhere to specific regulations to carry insurance and protect the safety of people and property that may be affected by a flight.
This is in contrast with NASA, which is a research and development agency of the U.S. Federal Government, and as such neither operates nor regulates the commercial space transportation industry.
An amateur rocket has a total impulse of 200,000 lb-s or less, and cannot reach an altitude of 150 km above sea level.
It is easier because unlike a license, an experimental permit does not require an Expected Casualty analysis, nor a full System Safety Process.
In the simplest case, a rocket will have containment, which means that there are no people or property located within the maximum range of the vehicle.
A calculation of risk takes into account various failure modes of the rocket, various locations of the people, various shelters in which they reside, and various manners in which they can be hurt (direct impact, blast overpressure, toxic cloud, etc.).
Newer vehicles especially do not have the history required to demonstrate reliability, and thus the uncertainty in quantitative analyses can be substantial.
AST will generally require verification (evidence of an operator using mitigation measures) for every safety-critical system on the vehicle.
