Here's a little blurb from this week's Av Week (subscription required--I don't know if it's even available on line with a subscription):

Easy On The ELVs

NASA’s astronauts aren’t exactly ready to kick the tires and light the fires for aride on human-rated Atlas V and Delta IV Evolved Expendable launch Vehicles 9EELVs), an early candidate for getting the proposed Crew Expendable Vehicle to Orbit. In a May 4 white paper the Astronaut Office at Johnson space Center call the for an order of magnitude reduction in the fatality risk on ascent, and fret that an EELV simply may not be up to the takes even with upgrades for human safety. “These rockets belong to a family of vehicles with a success rate of 0.975,” the white paper states, noting for comparison that on ascent the space shuttle has a 0.991 rate even counting the Challenger disaster. “Even with extensive modification, they may never achieve a meaningfully higher success rate.” The Astronaut Office took the position that “human rating should be designed in, not appended on.” Upgrading EELVs “could potentially be as costly as building a new human-rated booster,” and still “would place excessive burden on abort mechanisms to save the crew” with a reliability estimate of 95% based on the record of the older Atlas, Delta and Titan rockets.

- Av Week, 14 Jun 04, page 15, first column, upper left.

The (NASA) astronauts are being self centered here, and I don't mean that in the sense of looking out for their own keesters--I mean that they're ignoring the fact that they're not going to be the only people going into orbit over the next couple decades. If they simply want to object to putting up a capsule on an EELV, I agree with them as far as that goes--it's a very expensive way of getting into orbit. But there are a lot of other issues involved as well. I'm not sure what they're proposing here as an alternative, and I do in fact think that a capsule on an EELV would be safer than the Shuttle, even if it's not as reliable.

The emailer who sent this item to me notes:

I have several criticisms. First, the author(s) believe that a new vehicle can be made more reliable than existing ones by virtue of setting the requirements. The two subproblems here are that they do not understand debugging a new product, and they ignore the marketplace that is trying to do that and hoping to sell vehicles to these people to increase their experience base.

Second, they think the budget to do this is going to come from...................where?

Third, and most importantly, they don't seem to grasp that you have to assume that any given vehicle will fail. Given that, the escape tower and/or ejection seats are what save your bacon.

Yes. EELV may not be reliable, but it will be safe (just as the Russians were saved with an abort motor off the pad back in the mid eighties).

They also, like many others, use the word "human rating" as though it has some universally understood meaning. We can get vehicles as reliable as they seem to desire, but we won't do it in a single generation, and we won't do it via a NASA contract to a NASA contractor (and it won't happen via "human rating"). If the astronauts really want to get safe and reliable vehicles, they'll be encouraging their agency to put up money to buy rides from the emerging entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, it looks like the Aldridge Commission is going to let the agency stay in the manned space transportation business. If so, that's probably the biggest single flaw in their report.

By the way, if any astronauts are reading this (I know that at least one does), I'd be happy to post your comments, without attribution. It's an important debate.

It seems like a fairly clearcut plan to have NASA help the entrepreneurs to become progressively more proficient at safe manned space activity. But maybe the dynamic in Washington (not just NASA) precludes this in an efficient fashion, and we should follow the second best strategy: first, do no harm. Perhaps common cause should be taken with the astronauts to kill manning of the EELVs, in order to ensure that direct subsidies don't trump the entrepreneurs' efforts.

Left to their own devices, it appears that the entrepreneurs have some prospect of putting manned programs together. If they appear to be succeeding over the next couple of years on their own, then it will be much easier then to kill the NASA manned Earth->LEO program.

Accidents happen. I'll bet that well over 1,000 people have died in commercial avaition over the last decade, not even counting 9/11. Even though it's statistically insignificant compared to the millions who travel safely by air every year, it's still a lot of dead people.

I don't know how it is now, but the early astronaut corps were all experienced test pilots who often flew uproved experimental aircraft. I am willing to bet that there are hundreds who would quickly take their place in a capsule that has a better abort survivability than the shuttle will ever have.

I'm not a pilot or an astronaut, but I'd go up in a capsule that has triple 9s on abort survivability on a rocket with a 20% failure rate.

I wonder if those people would have considered Wright Flyer "man rated" ?

I don't buy the arguement:
"Don't use EELV because it is not safe for astronauts compared to the a) the shuttle or b) some hypothetical clean-sheet designed booster.

Even if we accept the statistically argueable statement that the shuttle is 99% successful vs. the EELV at %97.5 then we have a two unacceptable choices. Blowing up astronauts on average every 30 or 50 flights isn't very nice.

As you point out, it is unrealistic to argue against the strawman of a perfect, non-existing, future launch system. I see no evidence that we can build a "human-rated" booster that is of greater demonstrated reliability than the shuttle or EELV.

I do believe that an abort system can be designed that will greatly enhance the chances of survival in the case of booster failure.

IIRC, the Soyuz booster hasn't caused the death of any Cosmonauts, but has had several statistically predicatble booster failures. The abort system has functioned successfully on more than one occasion.

If the criteria is astronaut safety, it is a pretty straight forward conclusion that a launch abort system is what is needed, not an infinitely reliable (fictional) booster.

BTW, strange that they are so concerned about launch failure. Both Russians and US has killed statistically similarly significant number of astronauts on reentry too.
EELVs will have no part to play on reentry.

Well, I think it is possible to build reliable space transports, but NASA has certainly demonstrated not only that they can't, but that they don't want to. It certainly won't happen via a conventional cost-plus contract to the usual suspects. It will only happen by continuing development of the kind of thing that's going to occur on Monday up in Mojave.

Speaking of which, I saw something appropriate at www.despair.com (they take a humorous "bad side" spin on many subjects):

www.despair.com/potential.html shows a box of french fries (think masses/many)) and says "Now Everyone Gets To Be An Astronaut When They Grow Up." In other words, astronauts aren't going to be special anymore.

I loved it, but they really blew it this time - this is an extremely upbeat message. I'm sure some people at NASA will be annoyed, though.

D'oh! Just looked at it again. The first word is "Not." My Lasik must be failing.

Okay then. THEY'RE WRONG.

It would certainly be psychologically more acceptable if it didn't have both 'crew' and 'expendable' in the name.

Not that it really matters to me. Most of my hopes for the future of this stuff will unfold in Mojave early Monday. I'll be with LocationConnect in the XCOR area.