Just yesterday on my other blog, in Addendum on Jet Propulsion Technology, I mentioned the progress being made in the engineering of REL's SABRE engine, which is intended to power the Skylon spaceplane, a single-stage to orbit, horizontal take-off and landing craft. Now today the BBC has a new piece on the Skylon spaceplane, and while the article detailed some of the progress with the craft itself, the pretext of the article was that Europe lacks a regulatory regime for spaceplanes, which means that, "its entry into service will be blocked."
I suppose there are folks who think that it is a great thing that everything is carefully regulated, but it is remarkable to contemplate how regulatory regimes began as safety measures for already-existing inventions and circumstances, but that now regulatory regimes seem to be reaching into the future to stifle innovations and developments that have not yet taken place.
Fortunately most game-changing inventions (like, for example, the internet) come out of nowhere and take almost everyone by surprise; if this weren't the case, our legislators might have the ability to nip the future in the bud before it ever has a chance to bloom. All in the name of the public interest, of course.
