For many years, parts of America’s space industry have complained that the rules governing the export of technology are too strict. Understandably, the government does not want militarily useful stuff to fall into the hands of its foes. But the result is a system that is too strict in its definition of “militarily useful” and which favours lumbering dinosaurs such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which survive on fat government contracts, rather than nimble but small “furry mammals” that need every customer they can get, domestic or foreign.
In December 2007 one of those mammals, a company called Bigelow Aerospace, filed the first legal challenge to America’s rules for exporting space technology. It disputed the government’s claim that foreign passengers travelling on a spaceship or space station were involved in a transfer of technology. The outcome suggests that there may be a chink in the armour of the export-controls regime.
Improbable as it sounds, Bigelow Aerospace makes and launches inflatable space-station modules and hopes, one day, to build a commercial space station. Under the existing rules, any non-American passengers on its space stations would have to comply with onerous export controls. These take months to satisfy and could plausibly even culminate in government monitors being present while the foreigner was near American space technology. Even training on the ground in a mock-up module was deemed a transfer of technology and therefore required export controls.
Yet, taking a passenger flight does not mean you can build an aeroplane, observes Mike Gold, head of Bigelow’s office in Washington, DC. His line of argument, it seems, has been accepted. Mr. Gold says that the company received the ruling in February and that it has spent the past two months digesting it. He says that Bigelow has got “everything we could want”, though the ruling still precludes passengers from what he describes as the “bad-boy list of export control”—nationals from Sudan, Iran, North Korea and China will not be allowed to fly or train on suborbital passenger flights, or visit Bigelow’s space station.
Other private space companies have welcomed the ruling. Marc Holzapfel, legal counsel for Virgin Galactic, describes it as a “major development” because it frees the industry from having to go through the “complicated, expensive and dilatory export-approval process”. Tim Hughes, chief counsel of Space X, says the approval is exciting, because it seems to represent a “common-sense approach” and bodes well for similar requests made by companies such as his own to carry foreign astronauts hoping to work on missions to the International Space Station.
The result also means something to the entire export-control regime, known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Robert Dickman, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, says the decision appears to convey a new willingness to “move away from the very restrictive approach that has been in place for almost a decade”. His organization is hosting a forum later this month involving the private spaceflight industry and senior government officials to discuss the regulations.
During the American presidential campaign, Barack Obama said that, if elected, he would review ITAR, focusing on space hardware. George Nield, associate administrator for commercial space transportation within the Federal Aviation Authority, says although he has not seen the new ruling, it was good news that the government “may now be willing to revise some of its export-control restrictions to enable American firms to be more competitive in their efforts to sell aerospace products and services globally”.