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Commercial Spaceflight Federation Responds to the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel's Report, Commercial Spaceflight Federation
"Despite the ASAP Report's contention that commercial vehicles are "nothing more than unsubstantiated claims," the demonstrated track records of commercial vehicles and numerous upcoming manifested cargo flights ensure that no astronaut will fly on a commercial vehicle that lacks a long, proven track record. The Atlas V, for example, has a record of 19 consecutive successful launches and the Atlas family of rockets has had over 90 consecutive successes, and dozens of flights of the Atlas, Taurus, and Falcon vehicles are scheduled to occur before 2014 in addition to successful flights already completed."."
Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Releases Annual Report (PDF)
"The panel's report provides a summary of key safety-related issues the agency confronts at this time," ASAP Chairman Joseph W. Dyer said. "The most important relate to the future of the nation's human spaceflight program. Critical safety issues the panel reviewed include human rating requirements for potential commercial and international entities, extension of the shuttle beyond the current manifest, the workforce transition from the shuttle to the follow-on program, the need for candid public communications about the risks of human spaceflight, and more aggressive use of robots to reduce the risk of human exploration."
Different people mean different things when they talk about commercial launch vehicles.
Atlas and Delta do, in fact, have a "long, proven flight record." It's reasonable to think that you might be able to mod them for human launch. They're not cheap, though-- it's not clear that you'd save money switching to ELV variants from Ares-1. (Although the Air Force would indeed benefit, since they'd have a bigger production run).
In the same sentence, however, they talk about the Falcon launch vehicle. This one does not have a "long proven flight record"-- in fact, the proposed human launch vehicle, Falcon-V, has no launch record at all.
Likewise, Taurus, to date, is a mini launch vehicle. Taurus-II (which still hasn't flown) will compete in the old Delta-2 market.
Falcon and Taurus both are going to need a lot of launches to prove that they are reliable enough for human launches. I do, in fact, have confidence that they can get there eventually. But, right now, they're not there.
(I'm a great fan of the COTS project, by the way-- let's fund them to send cargo to space station, and give them a chance to build up a success record. One step at a time.)