SPACE Act approved by House, en route to Senate

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

A bill that extends the “learning period” limit on safety regulations for people flying commercial spacecraft and legal protections against third-party damages related to such launches through the year 2025 has been approved by the US House of Representatives.

HR 2262, also known as the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act, was approved by a 284-133 vote after roughly two hours of debate last Thursday, according Space.com. The act combines four individual space-related bills that were previously approved by the House Science Committee.

House Science Committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said that the SPACE Act was “the future of space” and “facilitates a pro-growth environment,” while Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Maryland), ranking member of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, called it “an unbalanced bill” that “doesn’t adequately protect the public’s interest.”

Debate over House, Senate versions of the bill

According to Space.com, Edwards questioned the extension of the regulatory learning period and the requirement that would-be space travelers sign cross-wavers of liability with their launch providers. She and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) also criticized the House for voting on the bill without subcommittee markups of the original bills or Congressional hearings regarding the space resources section of the legislation, calling it an act of “negligence.”

House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California), lead sponsor of the bill, defended it and said that both parties received a copy of the act in October. Prior to the vote, Edwards introduced an amendment to replace the text of the SPACE Act with an alternate bill approved by the Senate on May 20, which contains many of the same provisions as the House bill, but only extends the learning period and launch-related legal protections through to 2020.

That amendment was defeated, 236-173, the website reported.

Edwards argues that the SPACE Act has a “snowball’s chance” of actually being approved in the Senate, which she claims will likely favor its own version of the bill (one that purportedly has the support of both parties). She said that while the Senate version “doesn’t have everything I would like to see in a commercial space bill,” it does have “a core set of provisions that I think we and the industry can support.”

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