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. F

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.