>to fly manned missions, starship either needs to be redesigned to accommodate an escape system, or it needs to show a level of reliability and safety never previously achieved by a rocket.
Starship doesn’t need a 1960's style launch escape system. The whole ship is the crew vehicle. If the booster fails, Starship separates and flies away on its own Raptors. That’s the plan SpaceX has stuck with for years. NASA requires high reliability and failure tolerance for crewed flights, not a regulatorily mandated escape system.
If you extrapolate the safety record of Falcon onto Starship, which seems conservative given that Starship is going to be their focus, it will be far safer than the Space Shuttle.
The Space Shuttle blew up 2 out of 135 flights, 1.5%. Falcon has 3 blow-ups out of 720+ flights. That's more than 20x as safe, and includes the aggressive/early R&D.
Starship is still being developed. Unless they go under somehow, it's going to be safer than the Space Shuttle by similar orders of magnitude.
Starship doesn’t need a 1960's style launch escape system. The whole ship is the crew vehicle. If the booster fails, Starship separates and flies away on its own Raptors. That’s the plan SpaceX has stuck with for years. NASA requires high reliability and failure tolerance for crewed flights, not a regulatorily mandated escape system.
If you extrapolate the safety record of Falcon onto Starship, which seems conservative given that Starship is going to be their focus, it will be far safer than the Space Shuttle.
The Space Shuttle blew up 2 out of 135 flights, 1.5%. Falcon has 3 blow-ups out of 720+ flights. That's more than 20x as safe, and includes the aggressive/early R&D.
Starship is still being developed. Unless they go under somehow, it's going to be safer than the Space Shuttle by similar orders of magnitude.