As those who may have checked out my profile, I am an aircraft mechanic, and have been for coming up on 20 years. As with any aircraft mechanic, I am very familiar with the Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARs. These are federal laws, specifically Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
One of the problems in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's space policy document is that it appears to designate NASA as the regulatory agency in charge of spaceflight activities. NASA was never chartered as a regulatory body; the FAA is. In fact, the FAA already has some regulations pertaining to space launch and recovery operations (the Part 400 series FARs in Title 14 of the CFRs). I'm assuming that this is some sort of error or oversight on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's part, and not some sort of Executive Order changing governmental policy.
In any event, the Part 20 series FARs describe, in very great detail, the airworthiness and certification standards for different types of aircraft, engines, propellers, etc. There are literally several thousands of pages of regulations there, and if a person or company wants to develop a new airplane, helicopter, engine, or whatever, and sell it as an FAA-approved airplane, helicopter, engine, or whatever, that whatever-it-is will have to meet every single one of those regulations pertinent to that whatever, and demonstrate that it does; the FAA isn't just going to take your word for it.
Every major component, and nearly all minor components, have some sort of regulation pertaining to what size or shape it must be, how many of them there must be, where they must be located, what they can be made from, what types of indicators and controls must be provided. This has contributed greatly to our air transportation system being one of the safest in the world; you've got to go back quite a ways to find a design-related fatality accident involving a major US air carrier. (Specifically, design standards for transport-category airplanes (i.e., airliners) can be found in Part 25 of the FARs.)
The problem is that there is no equivalent for spacecraft. There are some basic regulations concerning the licensing and operation of launch and recovery facilities, pilot training requirements, and financial liability. Some of this perhaps leaves something to be desired; for example, a private pilot that has an instrument rating (for flying blind, on instruments only), with a 2nd class medical certification, has all that's required to fly a spaceship (other than some training on the spacecraft itself). What this means is that an airplane pilot with as little as 125 hours of flight time could, in theory, be legally qualified to carry passengers into orbit. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have someone a little more qualified at the controls--someone like US Airway's Captain Sullenberger (the pilot who put his Airbus down in the Hudson River last year--that was a very impressive piece of airmanship and coolness under pressure).
The biggest section (in terms of verbiage) of the Part 400 series of the FARs has to do with financial responsibility. This has everything to do with a little quirk of spaceflight. If you crash your privately-owned airplane into a house, you're liable for the damages--per international treaty. If you crash your privately-owned and -operated spacecraft into a shopping mall, the country from which you launched your spacecraft from is liable--per international treaty. So in order to obtain the FAA-required launch site license, you have to have liability insurance up to the limits specified in the FAA's regulations. Of course the government's attorneys got ahold of this one, and so it takes them page after page after page to say pretty much the same thing.
But there are practically no design or certification standards for spacecraft. Having a pretty decent knowledge of the FAA and how long things can take, this lack of standards is going to take a long time to rectify. It may be the Obama adminstration's intent to have the FAA cooperate with NASA in developing these design standards (and I hope they do; the NASA guys are the ones who know all about spacecraft design, operation, and maintenance). But until this happens this leaves a rather large and glaring hole in the entire plan to encourage commercial manned spaceflight.
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