NASA Begins Commercial Partnership With United Launch Alliance

wrote:

NASA and ULA's unfunded Space Act Agreement (SAA) requires ULA to
provide data on the Atlas V, a flight-proven expendable launch
vehicle used by NASA and the Department of Defense for critical space
missions.

NASA will share its human spaceflight experience with ULA to advance
crew transportation system capabilities and the draft human
certification requirements. ULA will provide NASA feedback about
those requirements, including providing input on the technical
feasibility and cost effectiveness of NASA's proposed certification
approach.

"This unfunded SAA will look at the Atlas V to understand its design
risks, its capabilities, how it can be used within the context of
flying our NASA crew and maturing ULA's designs for the Emergency
Detection System and launch vehicle processing and launch
architectures under a crewed configuration," said Ed Mango, NASA's
Commercial Crew Program manager.

...

"We believe this effort will demonstrate to NASA that our systems
are fully compliant with NASA requirements for human spaceflight,"
said George Sowers, ULA's vice president of business
development. "ULA looks forward to continued work with NASA to
develop a U.S. commercial crew space transportation capability
providing safe, reliable, and cost effective access to and return
from low Earth orbit and the International Space Station."

In 2010, NASA awarded $6.7 million to ULA to accompany its own $1.3
million investment to develop an Emergency Detection System
prototype test bed. The EDS will monitor critical launch vehicle and
spacecraft systems and issue status, warning and abort commands to
crew during their mission to low Earth orbit. EDS is the sole
significant element necessary for flight safety to meet the
requirements to certify ULA's launch vehicles for human spaceflight.


That last sentence definitely caught my attention. I wonder how one
defines "significant?"

rick jones
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