Sounds like the old NASA paradigm. Beyond competition potentially lowering costs, it also gives redundancy. So now, while Starship has been having delays, Blue may be able to enable a landing sooner. And if private investors are willing to invest NASA can spend its $ elsewhere.

You have a gift for understatement

New Glenn hands down

Yes; as with aircraft, industry and the regulatory body should develop this together. The 100% safest rocket never launches but clear that’s not a responsible criterion!

FAA doesn’t dictate, it sets standards working with industry. So, with jetliners, it doesn’t mandate how many doors or window exits they have - they agree upon a reasonable evacuation requirement, say 15 minutes, and lets the manufacturer demonstrate they meet it.

The Wright brothers flew in 1903; the CAA & certification was established 23 years later. Space ship 1 flew in 2004 - 22 years ago. How long is enough? Certainly for carrying government passengers, there will be requirements just as there was for Dragon and Starliner.

All well and good and, e.g. experimental aircraft, exemptions will be possible. But, especially after the first catastrophic failure, safety regulation compliance will be a competitive advantage and governments, insurers and corporate boards will all require safety standards.

That was because of a regulatory “learning period” exemption that commercial space advocates pushed allowing for informed consent as with experimental aircraft. That waive expires in 2028.

Well maybe it gets moved to FAA for safety certification but, a century after the Air Commerce Act created the CAA, we still use government regulations to certify aircraft for passenger safety. Other governments around the world I’m not sure why space safety would be different.

Agreed - yeah NASA got so hard to human rate things, they made exceptions and never really could meet their standards for human rating, certainly after Challenger exposed the design’s limitations.

Note that Dragon also has an escape system. Another way might be demonstrating reliability by launching the same configuration A LOT and showing design and supply chain consistency. But that doesn’t match SpaceX’s iterate continuously & accept failures design approach.

The old way, at least from the Shuttle era, was to try to bullet proof every system since there was no escape system; an expensive process. Unfortunately, as Columbia showed, that’s no guarantee of success. So Orion returned to an older plan - an escape system.

Great news for an innovative new @VisitSpaceBeach company!

To meet human rating requirements,Starship needs lots of 100% successful flights & it’s not clear that it could dock at ISS or CLDs. Also, there is no crew escape capability - a key flaw in Shuttle and the reason Orion has one. Not sure if NASA has design insights thru HLS.

Great news

Falcon is being replaced with a vehicle optimized for Starship; not every customer needs that. “Old tech” isn’t the issue - it’s SpaceX’s business plan to maximize returns from their Starship/Starlink investments.

The old model made sense for national security assured access to space; not every national launch requirement necessarily has only a commercial answer.

Am I the only one who recalls NASA awarding them the HLS contract in 2021 because they were the ONLY company able to land a crew by 2024?!😂 Starship is designed for Starlink deployments - Blue is highly likely to land in the moon first. Disagree? how’s that FSD Tesla doing?!