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SpaceX has explicitly very different approaches for crewed and uncrewed crafts. Uncrewed rockets are pushed to the limit over and over and over again, to drive innovation and thoroughly test them. As soon as a single person is on board, their margin for error goes to zero.

I'd argue this is in fact superior to NASA's approach, which rarely allows for uncrewed testing (and spectacular RUDs), leading to technological stagnation and catastrophic organizational risks. (i.e. internal resistance to doing anything about the O-ring problem on Challenger, even though they had been alerted about the potential issue).



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