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But… why go to all that effort when you can just pop the capsule and land in a thing that is not full of highly explosive fuel? Elon had that idea of using roc

• skissane 2y ago
  > But… why go to all that effort when you can just pop the capsule and land in a thing that is not full of highly explosive fuel? SpaceX wants NASA to human-rate Starship because their long-term plan is to retire Falcon 9 / Dragon. How I expect it will happen: SpaceX will run their own internal analysis of loss-of-crew probability for launch and re-entry. No point going to NASA until they've convinced themselves they are going to meet the standards for human-rating. Once they believe they are, then they'll decide when is the right time to try to convince NASA of it too. Obviously they are already doing this for lunar landing/launch. Some of that is going to be transferrable to Earth landing/launch. Other parts are unique – e.g. probability of surviving re-entry – but they need to estimate that anyway for non-crewed use cases.