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Thanks for pointing out the other aspects. I was aware of the propellant loading with crew onboard and liquid abort engines but just forgot about them. You’re r

Thanks for pointing out the other aspects. I was aware of the propellant loading with crew onboard and liquid abort engines but just forgot about them. You’re right. There are a substantial number of other innovative aspects.

m4rtink 6y ago
Yep - also the computers. AFAIK they are both much more powerful (which is actually needed for the first stage to compute the best landing trajectory) as well as using relatively commodity hardware and and normal (IIRC C++) programming languages. I'm not saying rad hardened aerospace computers and specialized programming languages (ADA and co) are bad - there was a time where they were absolutely the best (any only) choice, but thankfully today there are often better options. IIRC for the Dragon computers I remember an article that mentioned that if they went with aerospace computers, even just a devkit would have cost >150 thousand dollars, severely limiting available resources for developers and the flight hardware would have lead time in years. So they went with redundant (IIRC 5 times) x86 with Linux on top & each engineer working on the code can have effectively flight hardware on their desk for use during development.