New Career Opportunity: Space Law Enforcement

Posted on Fri 08/05/05 in My So Called Blog

I received an email from a co-worker this morning which triggered some thoughts about the current Space Shuttle Discovery mission, named STS-114, which is going on at this very moment.

My entire life, I have known NASA to be synonymous with space travel (like Kleenex and tissue). But, I do not believe my children will be able to say the same thing.

I started to reflect on Paul Allen funding SpaceShipOne (the first private flight into space). I imagined that in the next half century, private spaceships will be buzzing by satellites and drag racing outside atmospheric limits. I did a quick Google search and found this article, encouraging my expectation:

http://www.space.com/news/beyond_spaceshipone_041006.html
(October 2004, Space.com)

In case the article disappears, below is an excerpt:

Shortly after SpaceShipOne touched down, the chief designer of that vehicle, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites, made it clear he’s already got his sleeves rolled up.

The ink has barely dried on an agreement announced on September 27 between Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and the Paul Allen company, Mojave Aerospace Ventures, to license the technology to develop the world’s first privately funded fleet of spaceships.

Along with Virgin’s agreement with Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the company has also signed a Letter of Intent with Rutan and Scaled Composites to utilize the technology in building a new spaceship and derivatives thereof, for the purposes of carrying paying passengers on a journey to orbit, returning to Earth as astronauts two hours later.

So, I thought, are there laws in space? Who are the space police?
Well, there ARE laws in space. The United Nations pretty much is the governing body. Here are some good resources on Space Law. Sorta weird, but I guess it had to be addressed. I feel like space around our atmosphere is already cluttered with satellites and bags of garbage or dead bodies. Who is going to watch out for the traffic that will continue to build?

I can see the job announcement on www.usajobs.gov:

LAW ENFORCEMENT
Location: Space, Milky Way Galaxy
Duties: Monitor all the moronic, space exploring, kin of rich uncles as they cruise around in $10,000,000 space vehicles. Issue tickets for driving too close to the Earth’s atmosphere, reckless orbiting, and space station hit-n-runs.
Salary: GS-9

Oh, and one last thing, I think it is suprising that Paul Allen’s spaceship is called SpaceShipOne. Wouldn’t you think the US Government would have reserved that one for itself (like Airforce One, the presidential jet)? I think it’s Allen’s way of saying to the world that Microsoft still has control of the government market share.