Jim Muncy talks about the bill

10/07/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

Jim Muncy is up to give us a legislative update (specifically on HR 3752). Right now he's covering the breakthroughs over the past year. But you can hear the “but” that's coming up. Jim is currently making the ubiquitous “politics is sausage” comment. “We have reached a crisis point in the legislation where passing no legislation at all ends up being a very good thing”. He's now giving a bit of history about the first meetings with Dana Rohrabacher, FAA's ruling changes, etc.

One thing that I didn't know about was that the Transportation department was asked to excercize its power to give the entire launch industry the maximum amount of relief from EPA require environmental assessments (essenntially a FONSI).

Now he's reviewing the whole Pioneer Rocketplane (now just Rocketplane, LTD) fiasco…

The language provided by the Senate back to the House for 3752 was “an abomination”. Apparently they said “we don't want people dying like they did in the shuttle”. So, not knowing what they were doing, they added language that said the

“safety of crew and passengers” in the pre-amble of the bill, on equal footing as the “safety of the general public (i.e. third party)”.

Where we are is some very helpful senators have agreed to hold up the bill from being passed by unanimous consent. XCOR, who has been working so hard on this from the beginning, has said they asked for it to be stoppped. They didn't say that if you pass this we will die. They said, if you do this we will do it but just not in this country.

The senate is not going to do anything this week.

They're going to still try and get something done during the lame duck session. So Jim is asking everyone to contact their Senators and say “the house did a really good thing but the Senate language is wrong and that they should work with the industry on the right language”.

So call today if you can.

hehe.. “the poison meat is in the Senate sausage machine so we're going to stop, clean out the machine, and start over”.

Hmmm… apparently there was more than just one poison pill but Jim couldn't show the new language to anyone so we don't know what the others were. Apparently the Senate just wrote something in a vacuum.

Call or fax your Senate: The Xprize has just been won. This is a great opportunity. Unfortunately the Congress is about to make really bad or no legislation that could kill this industry before it starts. You should contact your party leadership in the Senate Commerce Committee and say that they should work with the industry.“

Jim is going to write something up so we can send something more detailed before COB today.