Aviation Week talks to George Nield, who led the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, about how to manage the risks of private space travel without harming innovation in the wake of the OceanGate deep-sea submersible loss.
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Rush Transcript
Jennifer DiMascio: Virgin Galactic is poised to launch its first commercial human space flight mission, perhaps this week. It comes on the heels of a number of missions by Blue Origin, which is now on hiatus from New Shepard operations following an accident of an uncrewed version of the spacecraft last year. The flight is also taking place soon after the tragedy in the Atlantic Ocean, in which five crew perished on a submarine touring the remains of the Titanic, and any such pioneering expedition for pleasure, for science to push the boundaries of human understandings and the limits of biology, risk is part of the equation. I'm Jennifer DiMascio, the executive editor for Defense and Space, and I'm here with Space Editor Irene Klotz, who suggested we also have with us a special guest, and there's no one better to speak about the lines between technological innovation, adventure travel, and safety, than George Nield, a former leader of the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Office who went on to travel on the fourth crewed flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard. So to start out with, what was it like to travel to the edge of space?
George Nield: Well, first thank you so much Jen and Irene for talking with me today, it's a real pleasure to be with you. The flight on New Shepard was just an awesome experience. I have worked in support of our country's space flight programs for most of my career in the Air Force, at NASA, in industry and at the FAA. And so I had a pretty good understanding of what this would all be about, but it just exceeded all of my hopes and dreams and expectations. It was just a fantastic experience overall. For me, the high point of the flight was the view. They have huge, big windows on the capsule to look out and see the curvature of the earth and the thin blue line, that's the atmosphere that you were above. And then looking up from there, and instead of seeing blue, the sky is the blackest black that you could ever imagine. And that whole picture was just the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my whole life. It was just an amazing experience.
Irene Klotz: George, many of us look forward to the day of having that experience for ourselves. And thank you for describing it so articulately. If there're anything that would've kept you from doing the ride as far as what your due diligence was to fly on this vehicle, and if you had been able to make the ride or do you have an interest in making the ride on Virgin Galactic or any other new companies that may be coming down the pike?
George Nield: So I have wanted to fly the space since I was a child, and this was the first opportunity I've had to actually make it happen. I recognize that there is risk involved, and that's important for people to understand before they ride on top of a rocket. There is possibility as companies now have to brief their customers of serious injury or even death and accident that could occur, and people need to understand that and accept that risk and accept that as part of this informed consent regime that Congress has set up for commercial space flight now. So to answer your question, I recognize there was risk, but have been very impressed with the companies that are currently offering this opportunity. SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, and I think they have an outstanding team, very professional, very knowledgeable, and a good focus on safety. And so after completing my training, was confident and ready to go before my flight.
Jennifer DiMascio: Just to go back a little bit, what is informed consent? Can you describe that for us?
George Nield: Yes. So it's similar to what you encounter before a major medical operation. In this case, the company offering the human space flight has to thoroughly brief their customers about the risks involved and have an opportunity to ask any particular questions that they might have to make sure that they recognize this is not the same as flying on a commercial airliner. There is a very real chance of something going wrong. In fact, today there have been on the order of 400 human space flights from the United States since the beginning of the space age, and four of those have ended with a fatal accident, an X-15, Space Shuttle Challenger, Space Shuttle Columbia, and one early test flight of Spaceship two. And so that's about 1% fatal accident rate, which is 10,000 times more risky than the accident rate for commercial airliners. So people need to understand that and sign up for that before they agree to fly on one of these missions.
Irene Klotz: George have new companies beyond the ones that are under the guidance of former NASA people and people who have been in this industry for a while and lived through these accidents and maybe have the awareness and the emphasis on safety and also companies that have the funding to take their time. As the newcomers come in, do you think this regime of informed consent is adequate to handle the expected rise in commercial space flight travel?
George Nield: I think it's necessary but not sufficient. I think it's necessary and appropriate to keep this in place until we get to the point maybe number of decades in the future where the safety has been demonstrated repeatedly. But I think it really needs to be more than just, "Okay, well, something could go wrong. Let's let everybody do whatever they want." That's why I think it's really important to think about the moratorium or learning period that is currently set to expire later on this year and decide how do we feel about that and are there other things that we can do to continue to improve commercial human space flight safety.
Jennifer DiMasc...: Where do you think policymakers should draw the line between regulation and innovation here?
George Nield: So great question. As I listen to people talk about this, I see two high level perspectives at the extremes, basically. There is one perspective that says, "We have been sending people to space for more than 60 years." But industry has only done this a couple dozen times. Most of the space flights that we've had, the people on board were by NASA. So we don't have enough data. We don't have an enough experience to write regulations right now, and we can't trust the government not to develop potentially burdensome regulations that are going to stifle the industry before it gets going. So government needs to have hands off and let industry figure this out in terms of how to keep crew and space like participants safe. And then at some point, maybe after 100 or 1,000 or some number of launches, potentially including some fatal accidents along the way, then we'll know how to write regulations.
But for right now, we're fine just the way we are. A second perspective is a little bit different. It is, hey, these companies are doing this for the money. They're not trying to be unsafe, but we can't trust them to maintain a healthy safety culture or not to cut corners on safety issues if it's going to affect the bottom line. So as a result, the government needs to publish a whole bunch of very prescriptive regulations to tell industry exactly what they need to do to keep their crew and customers safe. Now, personally, I disagree with both of those assessments. I think the real question that we need to wrestle with is, is it possible for us to have a commercial human space flight regulatory framework that takes advantage of what we've learned over the last 62 years of human space flight and that encourages the continuous improvement of human space flight safety, while still allowing advanced technologies and innovation and new ways of doing business?
And I think the answer to that question is yes, it is possible to do that, and we ought to start now to see if we can put together such a framework with government, industry and academia, all rolling up their sleeves and working on this and talking about it. I think it is possible to come up with something that everyone could feel is common sense and you can live with. And my fear is that after the next human space flight accident, and we know that we're going to have more, because we have accidents in every mode of transportation, cars, trains, planes, boats, we're going to have in space too. My fear is that after that next accident, there may be a lot of interest and concern by the public, by the media, by congress, by the administration, and there will immediately be a lot of pressure for the FAA to put out some regulations that will prevent that from ever happening again, and unfortunately my experience has been fast regulations are bad regulations. So rather than going through that, let's work now on a new framework, and it doesn't even have to include regulations. It can be based on voluntary industry consensus standards. I think that would be a great focus for this effort.
Irene Klotz: George, are there any lessons from the tragedy that happened aboard the Ocean Gate submersible that give you, I guess, pause for thought as to how commercial space travel can evolve in a safe way that also allows for innovation?
George Nield: So I think there are similarities and differences between deep sea diving and submersibles and commercial space. Similarities, in both cases, we have a very harsh and unforgiving environment. There's a significant level of risk. Only a relatively small number of people have ever had that experience, and the cost, at least today, to buy a ticket is rather high. So those are some of the similarities. There's lots of differences too. One of the most important though may be that for submersibles, there's a comprehensive set of industry standards and common practice is for vehicles to be certified or classed as they call it, by marine organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, which is a accreditation organization based in Norway or Lloyd's Register. Now certification isn't mandatory, but the fact that that is out there and most people, most companies are choosing to follow that approach, I think is very helpful.
We do not have that today in commercial human space life. There's been some initial work by ASTM and other standards' development organizations, but most of the standards published to date have to do with things like terminology and propellant storage. They really are not focused on human space flight safety. So that's why I think it's important for us to work on that now so that we have that benchmark, that point of comparison. And getting back to the moratorium, I think frankly today with moratorium or learning period in place, industry does not really have any incentive to put their best people and effort into developing these industry standards. They view that as potentially giving away their secrets, their proprietary insights that give them a competitive advantage in the industry. And frankly, they're busy flying these spaceships and don't want to take their people offline, so to speak, for the benefit of the industry instead of the benefit of the company. So if we can figure out a way to say, "No, let's all come together and see if we can get these knocked out and then we'll all be able to benefit from result." That would be great. I think allowing the moratorium to expire might be just the incentive we need to allow that to happen.
Irene Klotz: Just to be clear, George, if the moratorium expires, doesn't the government then take the control of setting the safety standards for human space flight participants? Or are you saying that if the moratorium expires, then the private companies could then step in to create an alternative way of certifying the vehicles?
George Nield: The way I would describe the situation is that the Office of Commercial Space Transportation through delegation from the Secretary of Transportation, and the FAA administrator, already has the regulatory responsibility and authority to regulate commercial human space flight. However, in the presence of this moratorium, the FAA is not allowed to issue regulations that are intended to protect the safety of crew or space flight participants. So it's very limiting and constrained right now. Once the moratorium is lifted, then the FAA will have another tool in a toolbox in terms of how to ensure safety. If you ask them, I think the response that we've gotten is that the FAA does not already have a set of regulations in the file cabinet that they can just put out there and put into place. They just would love to have the ability to work with industry on coming up with what such regulations could look like if necessary.
And certainly as we've discussed, I think a reasonable framework would say, "Let's have regulations to protect the uninvolved public on the ground when it comes to those who fly on board these spacecraft." I think having industry consensus standards would be a great approach, and the FAA started to do things like that with things like light sport aircraft, where you don't have prescriptive regulations, you have this more performance space approach that uses standards where standards are available. Now, some companies are not comfortable with that approach for whatever reason. They could use the same philosophy by responding to the FAA's recommended practices for Human Space Flight Occupant Safety, which the FAA published in 2014. And again, those are not requirements. Those are the things that the FAA thinks that companies ought to think about when they're designing, building, and operating these systems. And companies could basically respond to those and say, "Okay, we like these things. This one, we disagree. We think, ‘Hey, we have a better approach and here's why.’"
And that could be fine instead of having requirements. A third option might be to use something known as the safety case methodology. That's something that's very popular elsewhere. The UK Ministry of Defense uses it. The nuclear industry uses it. The offshore oil and gas industry uses it. For whatever reason and hasn't been very common in the US aerospace industry. But under that, framework, basically, company would be responsible for having outside experts come in and do a safety audit of their safety culture and philosophy. And then the company would be responsible for convincing these outside experts why their system is safe. So rather than saying, the government gets to tell you what to do, the company can say, "Here's what we do and why we think it's appropriate." And if these outside independent experts say, "Yeah, that makes sense to us." Then, you'd be good to go.
So those are some options. I think having different choices, different ways to approach this is a really good thing. It does not necessarily have to include prescriptive regulations, but I think having some transparency, having some sharing in industry and academia and government, those are all good things. And we learned that in an aviation, frankly, where we have the ability to share what went wrong in an accident, an incident, a mishap, a close call, a test failure, that can be really helpful so that each company doesn't have to make those same mistakes on its own without taking advantage of what we've learned from other folks in the industry.
Jennifer DiMascio: Are you able to make any predictions for what way you think this will go come October 1st when those regulations may go by the wayside?
George Nield: So it is really up to Congress, and I've heard folks talk about it on both sides. It's hard to predict, frankly. It appears that it is tough to get pretty much anything through Congress these days. And so there's not much time for something to happen, but there could be a strong push at the end by those who want to see an extension from industry or other folks. We'll just have to wait and see. But again, I hope that we use this tragedy as an opportunity to reflect. Are we ready? And how would we respond from the aerospace industry to this type of a tragedy? And do we feel good about that? And the more we can think about that and get prepared, the better off we're all going to be. Because certainly the potential is there not for maybe one of the existing companies that is doing this, but for a new enter to come in, which doesn't have the knowledgeable experienced, people with safety as the North Star, and they could have a bad accident and it would spoil things for the entire industry. I don't think anybody wants that.
Jennifer DiMascio: Well, that's an excellent point and one that we'll have to end on. That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us, George. I really enjoyed the discussion. I'm sure Irene did as well. Don't miss the next episode. Subscribe to Check 6 in your podcast app of choice. And if you're listening to us in Apple Podcasts and want to support it, please leave us a star rating or review. Goodbye. Thanks again.
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