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NASA Campaigns For Safer Launch Requirements
NASA officials will speak before members of Congress this week in an effort to gain support for more stringent launch safety considerations for the space shuttle's successor. Crew safety remains a major concern for lawmakers while they debate NASA's future and the potential integration of private companies into US space flight plans.
"The demonstrated probability of a shuttle launch disaster is 1 in 129. NASA's 83 astronauts think those odds can be improved to 1 in 1,000. Independent safety experts agree. 'None of us want to repeat the accident history of the shuttle,' said retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer, chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group organized to oversee NASA programs after three astronauts died in the 1967 Apollo 1 launch pad fire. ... NASA's Astronaut Office began a re-evaluation of next-generation launch vehicle safety after the loss of Columbia's crew. The guiding principles laid out in a May 2004 report remain current, astronauts said. Launching astronauts into low Earth orbit is dangerous. But an order-of-magnitude reduction of risk is achievable 'and should therefore represent a minimum safety benchmark for future systems,' the report says."
NASA needs some extra funding to implement the changes and therefore has to ask Congress very, very nicely.
Lose an Arse launch and it's just a matter of replacing a capsule and hiring a few more astronauts.
Don't forget the training costs. Astronauts cost between $25m and $1bn to train, depending on whose estimates you use. Less than the cost of replacing challenger, but still a large chunk of money.
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After hearing astronaut Mark Kelly speak at a conference a couple of weeks ago, this was my first thought as well. When asked what his opinion was on the possibility of riding something like Dragon to orbit, he hesitated and said a lot about safety. There is the impression that somehow civil servants somehow are able to make things safer than the employees of a private company. I imagine a lot of it has to do with protecting the magic of being an astronaut, as the corps is also concerned that vehicles like Dragon treat them more like cargo than pilots (there was an Orlando Sentinel Op-Ed to that effect about a month ago).
Protecting jobs at the manned spaceflight centers, particularly Marshall, where they develop the rockets most at risk of being killed by private development, is another obvious goal. Senators from Alabama fought tooth and nail to keep kill funding for CCDev, since it could eliminate the necessity for MSFC to be crucial for each and every portion of manned space flight.