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" Ever since the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, almost a quarter of a century ago, the watchword above all others at NASA has been &amp;quot;safety.&amp;quot; Unfortunately, watchwords don&amp;#039;t necessarily create actual safety, as we learned a little over seven years ago, with the loss of her sister ship Columbia. Despite NASA&amp;#039;s own checkered safety record, the last refuge of those defending Ares I, which the Obama administration has proposed canceling in the new budget request, is that it will somehow be safer than the commercial vehicles proposed to replace it, despite the fact that it is years from flight and NASA is proposing to fly crew aboard the new vehicle on its second flight. Also, some of the proposed replacements, such as the existing Atlas V and Delta IV, have excellent reliability records. But now safety has come up in another context of the new space policy\u2014suborbital flight. At last week&amp;#039;s first-ever Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, in Boulder, Colo., high-level officials from both NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration addressed the issue of the circumstances under which the new commercial suborbital vehicles, such as those under production by Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace and Blue Origin, will be used to carry NASA-sponsored payloads and personnel. In her keynote speech on Thursday, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver announced that the agency&amp;#039;s 2011 budget request includes $15 million for a new program called Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR), to help researchers procure rides into space for their experiments and, ultimately, themselves. And in what seemed to be a pre-emptive response, she also noted, &amp;quot;One of the criticisms that we&amp;#039;ve had is that there will be risk involved. Well, folks, as you all know, NASA takes risks. That&amp;#039;s what we do all day.&amp;quot; George Nield, head of FAA-AST, the FAA office that licenses commercial launchers, later reinforced her message. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve read some comments that have expressed disappointment, indignation, disdain and even ridicule about commercial space transportation,&amp;quot; Nield says. &amp;quot;While it&amp;#039;s entirely legitimate to raise questions, it doesn&amp;#039;t do America&amp;#039;s future in space any good at all to raise fears in what might be interpreted as an effort to undermine an industry that has served the nation well and is now prepared to expand its contribution.&amp;quot; But the comments were interpreted by some in the audience to mean that NASA would be purchasing rides for researchers in the near term without oversight, and NASA issued a clarification the next day, saying, &amp;quot;NASA would like to clear up some misunderstandings related to the CRuSR Program. The CRuSR Program plans to purchase flight services for untended payloads supporting science, technology and education. NASA will NOT be paying for humans to fly on the commercial vehicles until NASA determines the vehicles meet NASA standards for human safety. NASA will treat these vehicles as the high-speed experimental aircraft they are when assessing safety. Dryden, which has 60 years experience flying high-speed experimental aircraft, including the X-1 and X-15, will lead the safety assessment. This NASA process will only apply to NASA-funded human passengers. The FAA&amp;#039;s rules for &amp;quot;informed consent&amp;quot; under the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act will be applied in other areas.&amp;quot; It wasn&amp;#039;t just safety that was a concern. Some in the aerospace industry perceived that they would now have to clear a second, new hurdle before they launch\u2014a safety blessing from NASA via Dryden\u2014on top of the FAA requirements to get a launch license required by law. The biggest concern, though, was that failure to get such an imprimatur from NASA might lead to public perception, justified or not, that a vehicle was unsafe. That could be enough to scare customers and investors into the arms of a competing launch company.  To unpack all this, I talked to Charles Miller, senior advisor for commercial space policy at NASA headquarters, and the man in charge of the CRuSR program. As a former space entrepreneur himself (CEO of Constellation Services International, not to be confused with the NASA program proposed to be canceled), he is exquisitely sensitive to such issues. &amp;quot;NASA is not in the business of certifying or blessing vehicles or operators,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;All of these companies are operating under a regime of &amp;#039;informed consent,&amp;#039; in which the customers fly at their own risk, and those companies are responsible for providing information necessary for the customer to be adequately informed. NASA is just another customer, and our way of informing ourselves is by having Dryden review any vehicles on which NASA experiments or sponsored personnel will potentially fly. Based on that assessment, NASA will make a decision as to whether the risk is worth the payoff to the taxpayer.&amp;quot; He made it clear that NASA wants to see this industry succeed, because in the new paradigm, it is ultimately key to reducing the costs of access not just to suborbit (a new research regime, at least at the scale allowable by frequent flights of low-cost vehicles, and for human researchers), but to orbit as well, as these reusable vehicles eventually grow in performance over time. He dismisses arguments that astronauts should ride in spacecraft that have the same standards as paying customers &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not about the risk, per se. It&amp;#039;s about the risk-to-reward ratio,&amp;quot; Miller says. &amp;quot;Wealthy people climb Mount Everest, too, with a very high risk of death. NASA doesn&amp;#039;t pay for astronauts to do that, because there is no perceived benefit to the agency in doing so. But if there is great value to flying an astronaut, both the agency and the astronaut will be willing to take a risk commensurate with it.&amp;quot; Of course, despite the misconception resulting from Thursday&amp;#039;s announcement, no one (except possibly test pilots) will be flying in these vehicles soon. All of the companies proposing to fly passengers and researchers will have an extensive flight-test program. And it&amp;#039;s likely, as Miller noted, that NASA won&amp;#039;t fly researchers on a given system until they&amp;#039;ve flown NASA hardware quite a bit first. Of course, if CRuSR money is spent in the form of grants, it may be that none of these caveats, including the Dryden review, will apply, because the agency will have no ultimate responsibility as to how the money is dished out. In any event, this new attitude may be one more nail in the coffin of the notion of &amp;quot;human rating&amp;quot; that critics (including me) feel has been used by the agency to stifle potential competition, not to promote safety. After all, the space shuttle fleet never met these requirements since it was never human-rated. The concept of human rating is a relic\u2014an artifact of the &amp;#039;60s, when in our rush to get to the moon we were putting humans on ballistic missiles not originally designed for that purpose. Had we continued instead with the X-15 and followup vehicles, gradually expanding the envelope into orbit, it&amp;#039;s likely that the phrase and concept would never have been created in the first place. Either way, as the deputy administrator implied, it is time to recognize that safety is not the best buzz word to define space exploration\u2014&amp;quot;accomplishment&amp;quot; has to be, if we want to make real progress in space. It&amp;#039;s encouraging to see NASA start to show that it recognizes this. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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