Following Space Exploration Technologies' Elon Musk's salvo the Commercial Spaceflight Federation has also responded to the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel comments on commercial launch providers:
Since the ASAP correctly points out that NASA has not yet developed standards and processes for human-rating commercial vehicles, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation disagrees with ASAP's implication that safety will be compromised because "no COTS manufacturer is currently HRR qualified," because, quite simply, it is impossible for companies to meet standards that do not currently exist.
on January 21, 2010 6:11 PM | Reply
Mr. Musk: succinct as usual. He's battling an institutionalized beaucracy attempting to justify a 12 billion taxpayer dollar expenditure with nothing (okay, astonishingly little) to show for it.
on January 25, 2010 10:26 PM | Reply
That's odd! SPACE X website goes on about how Dragon is designed in accordance with NASA rulings on Spacecraft safety and systems design:they even go on to ref. the relevant documentation.
What we're seeing here is NASA's last gasp attempt to retain a discredited and untenably expensive solution to a VSE LV requirement the intent of which was "go with what we've got". ARES 1 & V FAIL MISERABLY in that regard. DIRECT is the exact opposite - in it's original form.
According to NASA Watch, ARES 1 is dead. Keith Cowing seems confident of his sources: disturbing, because if instructed to switch over to their original( MT, 1978; NLS, 1992) design adapted by the DIRECT team - by mostly backroom NASA boys we're told - I can see much "counter-engineering" invoked to make it also appear untenable pricewise: and who better than NASA for doing that?!
If that happens, NASA will be out of the Manned Spaceflight business, as the funding WILL NOT be forthcoming: the current $1Billion increase agreed by Obama notwithstanding...
AS it is, Bolden is investigating the DIRECRT "Jupiter 24x/ARES 4" concept, but has ignored " Jupiter 130/ARES3" (ARES 1 replacement) completely, in the hope it would appear that ARES 1- a patently inadequate(Payloadwise) and unsafe(last test flight was at best a partial failure since if manned, loss of any Crew was a distinct possibility) vehicle whilst being expensive and LATE: ICGO&O!