Summary of Fall 2007 Technology / Public Policy Project Courses

The commercial spaceflight industry has long consisted of large aerospace firms funded primarily by government contracts. In recent years, however, a new set of small private firms, funded in large part by venture capital, has entered the commercial space flight market. These entrepreneurs, typified by Elon Musk's SpaceX and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, are building radically innovative craft for a variety of orbital and sub-orbital missions. Their goal is to make access to space cheap and reliable enough to attract a variety of new users, and turn a profit in the process. Services envisioned by these ventures include suborbital manned flights (adventure travel, space diving), platforms for research requiring microgravity or high speed conditions, microsatellite orbit insertion, express package delivery, remote sensing, military missions, supplying the International Space Station and other orbiting modules, and advertising. The Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) is charged with both promoting the development of these "new space" activities and regulating their safety.

The project will address the technological, economic, safety, legal, international dimensions of the New Space phenomenon. Specific questions that the project could explore include:

• Technologies. What types of New Space technologies exist today and are likely to be available in the coming decade? What new space services will be enabled by these emerging technologies?
• Economics. What is the demand for each of the new space services enabled by New Space technologies? What are the costs of these technologies? Can new space firms turn a profit? What role can/does insurance play in spreading risk for new space systems?
• Safety. What are the risks of New Space activities to workers, flyers, and the public? How should safety be regulated?
• Spaceport siting. What are fair public processes for siting new space ports, given the risks that such facilities would impose on surrounding populations.
• Informed consent. For adventure travel, what constitutes informed consent for passengers? Should children be permitted to fly?
• Space debris. How might New Space activities affect risks from orbital debris? Are existing standards for managing orbital debris adequate to handle greatly increased traffic to orbit?
• Technology policy. What policies, if any, should the federal government pursue to promote development of New Space technologies? Examples of possible policies include direct funding of technology development, insurance subsidies, and partnerships with government space programs.

If you have any questions on the additional information, please contact Keith at florig@cmu.edu.

Individuals potentially face a variety of community-scale hazards (tornadoes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, pandemic flu, floods, chemical spills). How well they prepare for, respond to, and recover from these hazards depends on how well they understand the situation and possible responses to it.

Many organizations have taken it upon themselves to provide such advice. However, they usually use an ad hoc process (sometimes called .message mapping.), in which self-appointed experts sit around and decide what it would be good for other people to do. When the experts understand the risk and their audience.s circumstances, then the advice can be useful. However, when those conditions are not met, their messages can be incomprehensible, irrelevant, or even insulting (e.g., if they ask people to do impossible or ineffective things).

In order to illustrate the limits to ad hoc advice, Keith Florig and Baruch Fischhoff, published an article in Health Physics (the journal of the Health Physics Society, which represents radiation safety experts). One of its analyses concludes that one list of recommended provisions would be too expensive for many people, while not passing a cost-benefit test as preparation for a terrorist nuclear attack. A second analysis develops feasible advice for what to do immediately after an attack, recognizing the extreme conditions, including likely constraints on communication. A third analysis considers public health and social justice issues in developing strategies of evacuating people from contaminated zones.

Although these analyses have passed through peer review (and even received some media attention), they are not above critique. Moreover, advice that is right for one hazard might be wrong for another (or vice versa). Even if valid, this advice has not been evaluated, in terms of how well people understand and believe its content.

The class.s task is to develop a suite of scientifically sound advice. Its initial challenge is to structure the task so that it can provide the most useful products, taking advantage of our large .work force,. with its diverse training.

If you have any questions on the additional information, please contact Baruch at baruch@cmu.edu.