Elon Musk: Dragon Must Never Fail—Starship Takes the Opposite Approach

Here's Elon Musk talking about the reliability of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, regularly used to send astronauts to the Space Station and for private missions.

“For Dragon, there could be no failures, ever. Everything's got to be tested six ways to Sunday. There has to be tons of margin. There can never be a failure ever for any reason whatsoever. That's extreme conservatism.

Falcon is a little less conservative. It is possible for us to have a failure of the booster on landing. That's not the end of the world.

And then for Starship, it's the polar opposite of Dragon. We're iterating rapidly in order to create the first ever fully reusable orbital rocket.”

Interview with Everyday Astronaut, August 7, 2021