An article in this week’s issue of Flight International magazine has a provocative headline: “US claims right to set new space tourism regulations globally after treaty examination”. As the opening paragraph summarizes:

US persons or organisations operating suborbital test flights outside the USA will still have to obtain a Federal Aviation Administration permit, according to newly proposed rules. This is because, under existing international treaties, governments are responsible for launches made by their citizens or legal entities beyond their own borders.

Another case of imperialist American hegemony? Hardly. While the Flight International article treats this as something of a revelation, this appears to be simply a continuation of existing policy that requires US operators to obtain launch licenses from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) even if those launches take place outside the US. For example, the HyShot 1 and 2 suborbital launches of an Australian hypersonics experiment required AST licenses even though they took place from Woomera, Australia, because they used a commercially-supplied US rocket, the Terrier-Orion. In addition, the multinational Sea Launch venture, led by a US company, Boeing, performs launches under an AST license even through they use a Ukrainian rocket with a Russian upper stage, launching from a Norwegian-built floating launch platform in international waters. So it’s only natural, under the existing regulatory regime, to extend that policy to cover suborbital space tourism flights.

The article does have a few small items of interest relevant to space tourism: it notes that Space Adventures has yet to approach AST for a launch license for its planned Russian-built suborbital spacecraft. Also, New Mexico’s spaceport license application to AST “has environmental work to complete” and Mojave’s spaceport license will likely need to be renewed prior to SpaceShipTwo operations there.

[Disclosure: my employer does work for AST, but is not involved in the licensing or rulemaking process.]

For months attention (and a little bit of ridicule) has focused on plans in the Wisconsin State Legislature to create a state aerospace authority charged primary with developing a state spaceport for commercial spacecraft, such as in the lakeshore town of Sheboygan. The bill has passed both houses of the state legislature and is expected to be signed into law by the governor in the next few weeks. So full speed ahead for Spaceport Sheboygan? Well, it depends on what you mean by “spaceport”, according to an article in Sunday’s Sheboygan Press. City officials, such as Gary Dulmes of the Sheboygan Development Corp., are focused on creating an educational center:

The planned science and education center is commonly referred to as Spaceport Sheboygan, but that term technically refers to an area of restricted airspace over Lake Michigan from Port Washington to Manitowoc, according to the SDC business plan. The City of Sheboygan has state permission to build a future public-use spaceport within that area.

But Sheboygan will not be Cape Canaveral, North Campus any time in the near future.

“Is there going to be commercial space travel? Yes. Will it be here? Who knows – but that was not the purpose of the aerospace authority bill,” Dulmes said. “There’s other firms that are out there trying to do it, seeing it as a huge moneymaker, but it certainly isn’t on our radar.”

State Sen. Joe Leibham, R-Sheboygan, who proposed the WAA bill, said the nine-member WAA would oversea potential future use as a launch site, but Dulmes said nothing larger than the 10- to 12-foot rockets used annually by Rockets for Schools is in the SDC business plan.

A companion article in the Press points out that it is possible for a suborbital spaceport to develop in Sheboygan, or elsewhere in Wisconsin, but it won’t happen soon. Both Leibham and George French, president of Rocketplane (and the founder of Sheboygan’s Rockets for Schools program a decade ago), said that the authority is a necessary first step. But as Sheboygan mayor Juan Perez put it, launching rockets from a Sheboygan spaceport “sounds a little bit far-fetched.”