Congressman McCarthy Introduces SOARS Act
Congressman Kevin McCarthy Introduces Bill to Streamline Commercial Spaceflight Regulations, SpaceRef Business
“Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R) has introduced H.R. 3038, the Suborbital and Orbital Advancement and Regulatory Streamlining (SOARS) Act, intended to streamline the regulatory process associated with commercial spaceflight.
The bill was referred to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee where it may get full support from the Republicans on the committee but likely no support from the Democrats.
Co-sponsoring the bill is Congressman Bill Posey (R) of Florida, who is a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.”
Democrats actually might support the Bill. However partisan politics will stop them short of voting for it. Welcome to the new Congress.
I agree, but it’s extremely disappointing. There seems to be an accumulating pile of Bills, proposals, and other papers that have been “acted on” independent of their actual content. If this is the new way of Congressional politics, then there should be no degradation of performance if six-year-olds were elected instead of the current crop of over-the-hillers. In fact, a cheap personal computer and five minutes worth of software writing could give you the same functional capability at a very tiny fraction of the current price — and nobody would have to suffer through 8-month (re)election campaigns. What I really find scary is that the US government, despite its flaws, is still one of the better governments on the planet in terms of caring for its citizens.
Not necessarily; there is much here Dems would approve of. I think it depends on the final form of the bill, whether there are amendments that might act as poison pills, etc. Almost every bill today is a sort of omnibus bill, a very unfortunate thing, and hardly anything makes it to a floor vote in the purity of its original form.
Marc, could you give us some context on this? In what committee/subcommittee will this be considered? How do we get our hands on the proposed text and who is in a position to work through the content and move it forward?
If Congress is no longer able to function by itself in the days of filtered ‘news’ and partisan politics, then we’ll just have to hold their hands the lead them.
As the article states the “bill was referred to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee”. The text is not available yet.
It would appear that it has not yet been passed on from the Government Printing Office to the Library of Congress. It may simply be because it hit right before the weekend.
If you are a US citizen, presumably you could call or email McCarthy’s office and ask for a copy of the draft text (or at least the core sections) and permission to forward it to sites like NASAWatch/SpaceRef.
If you are a registered Democrat, you might then call/email the offices of space-interested Democrats in the Senate, and ask them if they agree with the basic bill (and if not why? What areas need to be changed? Etc.) From there it would be organising a phone/email/letter campaign here and on other sites to recruit space advocates to push the issue with Reps/Senators who don’t have a strong interest in aerospace issue.
(I fall at the first hurdle, I’m not a US citizen.)