Ever cautious NASA requires any space craft carrying live astronauts to be "man rated", by which they mean the maker has filled out pounds and pounds of NASA paperwork for every single piece that goes into the spacecraft. One of the reasons Shuttles cost so much and flew so little was the burden of doing the man rating paperwork on every single part.
NASA claimed that man rating was so important that they could not use the highly reliable Delta and Atlas rocket boosters used by United Launch Alliance to launch communications satellites. They claimed that Delta and Atlas were not man rated and hence far too dangerous to boost astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). This was the justification for starting a new development of Ares booster rockets.
In the long interval between the end of Shuttle flights and the first Ares flight, NASA planned buy tickets to the ISS from the Russians. Naturally the Russians don't do NASA paperwork for man rating their Soyuz system. But NASA, based on the Russian record of successful launches (better than the Shuttle) decided to man rate Soyus, just to keep the paper trail in order.
If NASA really cared they could man rate Delta and Atlas just as easily.
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