An independent panel said Jan. 28 it could not evaluate the safety of NASA's commercial crew program because of the unwillingness of the agency's leadership to provide information the panel sought about it. In its annual report, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) said that efforts by the panel to gain insight into the program, including about contracts awarded last September to Boeing and SpaceX, were met with "a seamless set of constraints" regarding why that information could not be released. "Regrettably, the Panel is unable to offer any informed opinion regarding the adequacy of the certification process or the sufficiency of safety in the Commercial Crew Program due to constraints on access to needed information," the panel's chairman, Joseph Dyer, said in a cover letter to the report delivered to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. The panel focused its criticism primarily on one official at NASA Headquarters, the director of commercial spaceflight development, Phil McAlister. "This lack of transparency has been a concern for a number of years," the panel stated in its report, despite a series of discussions with him and other senior NASA leaders. "Over the last several years, the [director of commercial spaceflight development] has responded to ASAP's requests for information related to the plans on how commercial programs would be certified or how confidence would be gained on the safety of operations with a seamless set of constraints as to why the information could not be shared," the report states.
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