BTW has the Ariane booster begun getting human-rated yet? I saw a thing about that a while back.
I think this won't happen before 2015 at the earliest. ESA does not intend to convert the ATV for manned flights before 2015 as far as I know.
Supposedy Boeing has done the basic stuff to human-rate Delta as well, and Lockheed-Martin is looking at the Atlas V getting human-rating as well.
That would be great. They have all that available for relatively low costs compared to the Ares launcher. If they would have think about that when Constellation was introduced they could have saved a lot of time and money and still would do so.
