I'm If you pull up a chart of the number of space launches by year, you're going to see a hockey stick curve.

The frequency of launches is picked up dramatically. The United States, and in particular,

SpaceX, is responsible for most of that rise. It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to

stay this way. China is quickly upping its launch cadence. Our launch market, meanwhile, is fragile,

something we could easily kill with red tape. It's well and good to regulate the space industry.

There are all kinds of coordination problems to work out, but we need shrewd regulation.

Our federal government has a lot of administrative agencies. Which one regulates activities in outer space? There is no United States space agency.

So who fills the void, so to speak? Well, the Federal Aviation Administration

and the Federal Communications Commission. And maybe the Department of Commerce and the Department

of Defense. And maybe NASA, at least a little bit. And maybe the President has something

to say about it all.

This is the tech policy podcast. I'm Corbyn Barthold. My guest, once again, is Jim Dunstan,

General Counsel here at Tech Freedom. Today we're going to discuss the regulatory patchwork

that governs outer space, and perhaps what a better

system might look like. Jim and I have skimmed the surface of this topic before, but today we're

going to take a deep dive, orienting our discussion around a fantastic paper Jim has just put out.

It's called Regulating Outer Space, and he's given it two

subtitles, bureaucrats abhor a vacuum, and of gaps, overlaps, and stovepipes. Jim published the

paper recently with the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University,

and I encourage all of you, once you're done listening, to go read it in full.

Jim, welcome, sir.

Thanks, Garvin.

...