I've been keenly following SpaceX for a while. They look set to get the contract to ferry crew to the ISS http://www.spacex.com/
I'd be interested to know if any of these "experts" on this panel have ever worked for or hold any financial interest in companies that are likely to get the contacts.
Having just saw the indie flick "Moon" the other night, this scares me. Not from the humanitarian literal sense, but more so what corners a corporation may be willing to cut and safety measures forgone in order to minimise costs.
It is in their fiscal interest to make sure they don't screw this up.
Every part on the Space Shuttle is built by the lowest bidder already, same as in every large government procurement programme. Why do you think they keep having to scrub launches because something as small as an o-ring fails? How much does an o-ring cost compared to the cost of rescheduling a launch? It's a complete false economy to work like that, and only a government can really get away with it.
The o-ring failure had nothing to due with quality of the part. It had to do with politics, the engineers said that the part had never been tested under the conditions and recommended scrubbing the launch. I think Edward Tufte has gone into detailed analysis about how the engineers presented their case poorly.