Hard to say if that’s a good track record or not. Shuttle had 2 fatal missions out of 135, Soyuz had 2 fatal missions out of 147 manned missions. Nothing else is particularly close to those number of manned flights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soyuz_missions
Meanwhile, 17 people worldwide have died in on attempted space flights, while 169 people have died on in space flight related accidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... (Excluding the original V2 program which had even worse numbers.)
Delta II is from the same era and had only 1 failure that would have killed people aboard out of 155 launches.
Those weren't "manned flights", but if anything Delta and the later SpaceX rockets show that "human rating" isn't adding any safety worth caring about.
Of course you'd want to certify the life support equipment, but that's not why these rockets have failed.
I don't know about Russia, but the US human-rates the "launch" part of the system, e.g. the "stage 1" of the rocket. What I was pointing out is that given the available data it seems odd that we're engaged in that at all.
Especially if we consider SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 should probably have gained automatic human rating based on its record, but the bureaucracy persists.
I think saying the SLS only had one launch failure amounts to creative accounting, STS-107 was also a launch failure, just a delayed one.
If the orbiter had been boosted to orbit by magic it wouldn't have broken apart on reentry, it's only because of how the launch system works that it did so (tiles damaged during launch).
So, getting back to a Delta II (or a successor system), in that case the reentry system would have been a capsule protected by a fairing, and mounted on top of the rocket, and therefore debris falling onto the reentry vehicle during launch wouldn't be a failure mode of the system.
The astronauts on STS-107 could have survived if returned to earth via other means thus it was an issue but not inherently a fatal one. There were really 4 separate failures: the initial damage, failure to assess the damage, failure to have a standby vehicle, actual reentry failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-3xx
As to man rating the Falcon 9, SpaceX CRS-7 is a great example of why you man rate things. The Dragon CRS-7 capsule “could have been recovered if the parachutes had deployed, but the software in the capsule did not include any provisions for parachute deployment in this situation.” You really don’t want that kind of oversight when human lives are at stake.
Anyway the Delta II is reasonably close to the Soyuz but again the rocket itself is only part of the story. You need to look at everything from vibration and g loads to how you get people safely onboard. In the end it was simply cheaper to use the Soyuz and it’s proven systems than independently recreate nearly identical capabilities for minimal gain.
Or to put in another way, NASA only had two shuttle disasters.
Two is such a small number, right?
Funny now numbers can be used.
However I can see the glaringly obvious omission in my post that NASA, in its near 70 years of existence has had numerous casualties and explosions. But that's literally my gist: massive checklists, standards, and regulations are a result of that.
