By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A federal moratorium on commercial spaceflight safety regulations should be extended to support more innovation in the space sector, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz said on Wednesday, ahead of the scheduled expiration of a years-old ban on Oct. 1.
There are currently no regulations on the safety of privately built space vehicles. The fast-growing sector since 2004 has been shielded from federal safety regulations by what is widely called a "learning period."
"Now is not the time to impose new regulations on commercial space," Cruz said, speaking on the sidelines of an industry conference in Washington. "Allowing the learning period to expire would only serve to stifle innovation and undercut American innovation."
The moratorium, established by the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, was most recently extended in 2015.
The law requires private space companies that send humans into space to have passengers sign "informed consent" documents acknowledging the absence of federal safety regulations.
Some space industry groups have supported an extension of the moratorium that would last between six months to as long as a few more years. Though little consensus has been reached between industry and lawmakers on the length of any extension, discussion on the issue is ramping up as the expiration date nears.
In an April study tasked by the Federal Aviation Administration, the RAND Corporation recommended allowing the moratorium to expire on Oct. 1 to let the agency begin establishing industry standards and rules.
The moratorium's language complicates the FAA's ability to start standards discussions and collect meaningful safety information from companies that could inform safety regulations, said Doug Ligor, the lead author of the RAND study.
"Regulatory moratoriums are incredibly unusual," Ligor said. "It's not something that other domains have had - aeronautics, maritime, rail, medical - yet those industries are also competitive."
The FAA in July launched a Commercial Human Spaceflight Occupant Safety Rulemaking Committee to start collecting companies' recommendations on spaceflight regulations for when the moratorium expires.
"It's very important that we don't sit on our hands and begin to prepare for the future," Kelvin Coleman, head of the FAA's commercial space office, said at the conference in Washington on Wednesday. He added an extension seemed likely.
"From what we're hearing, it'll probably get extended," he said.
Cruz, the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, represents Texas, where Elon Musk's space company SpaceX bases the development hub for its next-generation Starship rocket.
The state's rural Van Horn region is where Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launches tourists and researchers to the edge of space aboard the company's New Shepard rocket.
SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are the primary U.S. space companies catering to wealthy customers willing to pay large sums of money to experience the exhilaration of supersonic rocket speed, microgravity and the spectacle of the Earth's curvature from space.