>People who pay to go can make their own decision if the risk is acceptable to them or not. It's not anyone else's business to decide what the acceptable level of risk is.

until they are a MIT trained airspace engineers, i doubt they are able to estimate the risk and thus to make a fully informed decision on their own. This is why it is official government agencies' business to at least establish minimum acceptable risk baselines.

And that's how you end up in a society where all risk-taking is banned to the fringes. No thanks, I'd much rather sign the "waiver from hell". High-risk activities CAN be self-regulated by industry, i.e. skydiving.

I'm no expert on this subject, but a small amount of Googling suggests that rumors of skydiving's lack of regulation in the US have been greatly exaggerated. For example, you can't just pack your own chute - there's a special FAA certification you have to get before you're allowed to do that.

The rules I'm seeing seem more like the ones that govern recreational sailing, which is a topic I'm more familiar with: If you're just doing it on your own, sailing is fairly lightly regulated. Your boat needs to meet some minimum requirements for safety equipment and the like, but for the most part all the rules for recreational sailing are voluntary and self-imposed by the community.

But all that goes out the window once you start doing it commercially. If you want to take tourists out on a day sail, you need to be a licensed captain and there's a whole host of federally-imposed rules about how you operate your boat that come into play.

Virgin Galactic isn't analogous to some guy day-sailing in his own boat. SpaceShipOne would have been, but SpaceShipTwo is much more analogous to commercial sailing, which is comprehensively regulated for the sake of consumer protection.

I wouldn't say this parallels with skydiving as it's something new. If I choose to go skydiving I can easily get a grasp on how dangerous it is by looking up statistics and choosing a reputable company with a good track record. If I choose to take a Virgin Galactic trip then unless I possess very specialist knowledge I just have to take their word that it's "safe".