The astronaut office has provided their view of the transition to commercial crew. I have some heartburn with it:

As commercial providers become integrated with NASA flight operations, questions pertaining to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) versus NASA certifications and standards arise. Currently, FAA (Office of Space Transportation) standards are only designed to protect the public from over-flight hazards associated with a launch. In contrast, NASA’s Human-Rating Requirements (HRR) for Space Systems (NPR 8705.2B) and Flight Rules have evolved over decades and are set in place to protect both the flight crew on board the vehicle and the public. It is anticipated that NASA and the FAA would collaborate in the future to determine rules and regulations for space control and commercial space vehicle licensing. Even with collaborative efforts amongst licensing agencies that evolve for human space vehicles, the NASA Human-Rating Requirements are the only current benchmark standards and should be used as the controlling document for certifying human rating of crewed spacecraft.

You mean the human-rating requirements that NASA hasn’t designed a vehicle to meet in decades, and had to waive when Orion couldn’t meet them? There needs to be severe pushback against this from the CSF.

One other point. I disagree with this requirement:

While on the ISS, each crewmember requires a path to return to the Earth in the event of a catastrophic station failure or medical emergency. A ready vehicle (lifeboat) attached to the ISS, in lieu of a ground based launch-on-need vehicle is required for ACR. A de-orbit in this ready vehicle must be executed to a targeted ground site capable of post landing support.

These are two different requirements, and may require two different vehicle types — a “lifeboat” and an ambulance. It also ignores the requirement of a non-catastrophic station failure, which might necessitate temporary abandonment, but not a wholesale evacuation all the way to the ground. I’ve always found the designation of “lifeboat” for a vehicle designed to return crew to earth to be a misnomer. A lifeboat is a temporary vehicle to provide protection until the survivors can be picked up by another vessel, not something that takes the Titanic passengers all the way back to Southampton.

There is an intrinsic assumption in this requirement that spaceflight remains expensive and rare, and that there are no other facilities in orbit to which to repair if there are problems on the station. But part of the idea of the new plan is to fix both these problems (or at least the former — I’m not sure much thought has been given to the latter, but cheap regular access makes it easier to solve). So, the notion of simply going somewhere else and waiting out either a repair of the station (if possible) or a rescue vessel from earth doesn’t occur to them, hence the (IMO, ridiculous) requirement that everyone has to go back to earth any time there’s a serious problem.

And it becomes doubly absurd if you insist that the assured return vehicle be an ambulance as well. If you use it for that purpose, it may kill the patient, since the design requirement for a crew return vehicle might assume healthy passengers, and have several gees on entry. In addition, it means that the station will be without a return capability for the rest of the crew, if the vehicles are one-size-fits-all. It would be a huge waste of (say) a six-person vehicle to use it to deliver one sick or injured crewperson. Again, this assumes that either a) there is no capability of getting an ambulance up from earth or b) no ability to so so in time. Now (b) is certainly a possibility for certain emergencies, but should we really let that drive transportation requirements? As I’ve pointed out in the past, the people wintering at McMurdo have no “assured crew return” capability, and when they get sick, they tough it out (including Jerri Nielsen, the woman physician who came down with breast cancer and treated herself until spring — she died last year). Why are astronauts more special than polarnauts? I’m sure that if we wanted to spend a few billion, we could come up with a vehicle that could extract people from the south pole during the winter. Why haven’t we done so?

These requirements are based on old mind sets and architecture assumptions. I think that they need rethinking, as part of a larger set of infrastructure requirements.

[Late afternoon update]

From a high-level government source:

The astronaut office, as well as many other NASA parties, have been making their views known for some time to the COTS team led by Geoff Yoder in ESMD. Industry will also be given an opportunity to provide input.

Allowing the astronauts to provide input is appropriate, as they are a “user”, but they are not in control.

That’s what I assumed. And hoped.