Originally Posted by Larry Jacks
...The Shuttle was never man-rated...

Of course... It was designed with occupancy in mind. It wasn't an unmanned craft that needed to be verified for manned use.

No, the Shuttle was never man-rated because it had no escape system. Perhaps if the Shuttle had an escape system, one or both of the crews that were lost might have survived. The point is that if man-rating wasn't necessary for the Shuttle to fly more than 100 missions, why is it a show-stopper for using an EELV instead of the Ares I?

Originally Posted by Larry Jacks
...Delta IVs and Atlas Vs are already built and flying. To date, they have a perfect track record. Each was designed to only require a small ground crew to prepare the boosters for launch and then to launch them...

Apples and oranges... Sure; the business vs government plays a part in it, but it's only one of the factors.
But, what about the factors between manned vs unmanned?
How much of launch costs are in personel used to monitor and check the crew compartment, the health monitoring, the astronaut workload?

Those are independent variables. You'll need the same personnel to monitor the crew compartment regardless of whether you use an Ares I or an EELV as the launch vehicle. The questions are how many people does it take to prepare the different vehicles for launch and how do we account for the difference? From the videos I've seen on the NASA channel, they routinely have 1-3 people standing around with clipboards watching a single person do a job. Are all of those people really necessary? Do they contribute to safety or to payrolls? Commercial operations have every incentive to have safe launches because failures are bad for business. Commercial operations have achieved an admirable success rate and they've done it with a less bloated infrastructure. Perhaps government operations can learn how to operate more efficiently but they have little incentive to do so.

The central question isn't whether an Ares I or an EELV (Delta IV or Atlas V) is the better choice. I was reading an article yesterday where an efficiency engineer made an interesting observation. Paraphrasing, he said "When you go to a hardware store to look at drills, what you really want is to make a hole. Once you realize that, you can open your mind to other options on how to achieve your goal."

NASA's goal is to put humans into space. Can we really say that the Ares I and Orion are the best vehicles for that job? At the moment, I'm not satisfied with their answers. My dissatisfaction is hardly NASA's concern. However, I'm far from the only one who is dissatisfied. If this dissatisfaction spreads - especially to Congress - NASA could be in real trouble.