It is hard to emphasize how much harder that last X% of reliability is to allow something like this for flights of hundreds of civilians. We’re not talking space tourism but a utilitarian service for business travelers and stuff.
Hey don’t even have a settled design and have made radical design changes recently.
SpaceX commercial crew program began in 2010 and is only just coming to fruition.
But principles are long since known, and prototypes are coming more and more often. Delta-Cliper, Space Ship One, New Shepard, unmanned Dragons, first stages of F-9, aerodynamic tests in wind tunnels - all of them contribute, to various degrees, to the technologies needed.
Hey don’t even have a settled design and have made radical design changes recently.
SpaceX commercial crew program began in 2010 and is only just coming to fruition.