"The heart of the act is its incentive structure: The United States would guarantee every year to pay $500 per pound for the first one million pounds placed into orbit by private US companies. An orbital payload must be at least ten thousand pounds."
When the Shuttle Challenger blew up, some of us who had been involved with O'Neill's SSI realized the opportunity to, in a sense, hijack the then-emptying L5 Society chapter in San Diego. We built on the CAC's recommendation to get the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 passed into law. I was privileged to give the Congressional testimony July 31, 1991 on commercial incentives intended by that act, and other proposed acts.
It took a while to get NASA to _really_ comply, but when it did, SpaceX was saved from bankruptcy and Blue Origin had a market beyond space tourism.
It was difficult to get even this degraded form of Pournelle's CAC recommendation passed into law, but what the CAC accomplished that made our job much easier: Reagan adopted an Executive branch policy that space launch should be privatized. All we really did was manage to get most of Reagan's Executive policy codified into law under Bush Sr.
