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by danpalmer 1019 days ago
I think this is a little unfair. SpaceX of 10 years ago didn’t have the same launch capacity and was not human rated, or even close to human rating.

Now the trajectory (no pun intended) of SpaceX was good back then and you might have guessed they would grow rapidly in capabilities and capacity, but it wasn’t a done deal.

I’m no fan of SLS, but it was a very understandable safe bet 10 years ago.
1 comments
justrealist 1019 days ago
> and was not human rated

The SLS has not launched a human.

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danpalmer 1019 days ago
No, but that was the plan all along, and it's built out of multiple components that have launched humans. I don't think the plan for F9 was to launch humans for a long time, or at least it didn't appear to be a focus for SpaceX until Commercial Crew came along.
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MaxRegret 1019 days ago
Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning with safety factors consistent with human-rating, rather than the lower safety factors required for cargo (1.4 vs 1.2 if I recall correctly). And with the very first cargo Dragon flight in 2010, SpaceX talked about how the windows and life support system pointed towards their ambition of flying humans on the spacecraft.

Now, as always happens, actually completing the human-rating of Dragon required more work than expected, and Dragon 2 is quite different from Dragon. But, as far as I know, Falcon 9 did not require nearly as many upgrades to be human-rated.

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