> if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it.

Are you sure about that?

https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...

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wat10000 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Your link says it failed in testing, not in flight.

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themafia 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Did they demand an unmanned flight just to prove it worked? Or did they accept an entirely new design based on modeling and ground tests and then immediately flew it with crew on board?

Then again I'm not one of those people who roots for NASA to fail for some reason.

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happyopossum 13 hours ago | parent [-]

None of what you’re saying happened.

They had a heat shield on the capsule that failed testing, so they swapped out the interchangeable heat shield for one that passed testing.

There was no entirely new design, there was no new material science, it was the same heat shield that the previous crewed capsules have used without the manufacturing defect.

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themafia 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> SpaceX's next Crew Dragon mission (Crew-5) will fly with a different, updated heat shield structure after a new composite substrate failed acceptance testing

I don't know what "new" or "different" or "updated" or "structure" mean then anymore.

	▲	wat10000 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Looking at other articles, nobody else mentions an updated structure. I think that was a misunderstanding. This was a manufacturing defect caught in testing and they used a different unit as a result.