Good to hear that the ISPCS 2009 did well this year - Twitter / Ken Davidian :

ISPCS attendance and other metrics were up 30% this year.

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Here is a press release from the ISPCS:

Augustine Committee Member Addresses Panel’s Safety Focus in Talk at ISPCS Conference

Las Cruces, NM, Oct. 22, 2009 – Augustine Committee member Jeff Greason, speaking at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) here, sharply disagreed with those who feel the panel didn’t adequately consider safety issues in preparing its recommendations for President Obama.

Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace, said emphatically that the panel “absolutely” looked at safety and mission assurance in all of its deliberations. Greason was one of 11 members of the panel chaired by Norman Augustine and formally known as the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

“Safety mission assurance was a high priority and we spent a great deal of time thinking about it,” Greason said in response to a question from the audience following his presentation about the panel’s recommendations.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) criticized the findings of the committee in a speech on the Senate floor today, shortly before Chairman Augustine presented the committee’s findings at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Shelby, who represents a state heavily dependent on NASA spending for the Constellation program that could replace the Space Shuttle, said in part, “The only safety issue identified was an assessment of how ‘hard’ the panel thought each overall mission would be to achieve–not the safest means to complete the mission successfully.”

Greason was one of more than 40 speakers at the annual ISPCS conference, an event that brings together experts from business, academia and government to measure the advances being made in personal and commercial spaceflight projects and to lay out the challenges that lie ahead for the burgeoning industry. The event is organized by the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium at New Mexico State University, and one of the conference’s major sponsors is Spaceport America, a facility under construction about 60 miles north of this southern New Mexico city.

Greason gave a detailed explanation of how the probabilistic risk assessment done during the design phase for Constellation and other space launch programs must by necessity look at “paper boosters,” and realistic data could only be obtained later on from real-world experience. He said that because the new Ares 1 vehicle being built to launch the Orion capsule would have relatively few launches, there would never be enough data to sufficiently assess launch risk.

Greason said the “overwhelming majority” of spaceflight failures are from human factors, including failures of design, testing, operational procedures and workmanship. He also noted that because the launch of a space vehicle bound for the moon or another destination is a “relatively small” part of the overall mission, a primary focus on launch safety is not the best use of money and manpower.

“It is not negligible, it is not something you want to forget about, but it does not dominate the loss-of-crew probabilities,” Greason said.