SpaceShipOne and Burt Rutan are running into roadblocks by the US government (hat tip Instapundit). Expected, but disappointing nontheless. A couple of points:

1. The planet must develop a private space travel industry. Competition for money will drive innovation and is the best way to make it available to everyone over time. This is important because of #2.

2. We need to not have this planet a the only place that humans live. The chances of us screwing things up big time is going to get greater as weapons, nanotechnology, genetic research, and others. all continue to move forward. In general, those things are all good things (feed the world, cure diseases, etc.), but have the potential to be problematic. Having permanent, self-sustaining populations off earth is essential to the long term existance of the human race.

3. Space flight is dangerous and will be dangerous for the next couple of decades. That is a reality that no one person or government entity can change. The key is to find the people that have better approaches and track records to safety, like Burt Rutan, and learn from them. Government should be in the role of facilitating space travel, not frustrating it. See the quote below for how regulation is getting in the Rutan's way.

4. The technology transfer is an real issue and should not be ignored. However, it does need to be balanced with the importance of space travel. Hopefully some sort of arrangement can be worked out.

The safety bit from a BBC article...

BBC NEWS | Technology | US export rules frustrate Virgin: "Mr Rutan saved his harshest criticism for another branch of the US government, the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which oversaw the flights of SpaceShipOne.

'The process just about ruined my programme,' he said. 'It resulted in cost overruns, increased the risk for my test pilots, did not reduce the risk to the non-involved public, destroyed our 'always question, never defend' safety policy and removed our opportunities to seek new innovative safety solutions.'

Mr Rutan said the problems arose because the same rules that applied to unmanned, expendable boosters were being applied to passenger spaceships.

The risks of unmanned rocket launches are assessed on the basis of failure scenarios - involving calculations of, for example, how many people might be killed or hurt if an explosion occurred just after lift-off.

Instead, passenger-carrying spaceships, like airlines, needed to be handled with a focus on reducing the probability of failure, Mr Rutan said.

'The regulatory process was grossly misapplied for our research tests and, worse yet, is likely to be misapplied for the regulation of the future commercial space liners,' Mr Rutan added."