Although there must be almost completely different training between the Boeing capsule and the spacex one, ultimately they had a good sync point to connection to the space station's "international format docking port". An arbitrary astronaut could ride in either, or at least without that much trouble. But LEO to the moon is going to be so different, and the landers were different. I'm sure there'd be no 'standard controller" so you could put lander from company A with transport to company B.
I worry more about spaceX's ability to land starship on the moon. Not because they won't get it right eventually in texas, but the moon isn't smooth. I know they will have a plan to deal with that, but getting a few ton lander with 4 legs to not tip over and handle tilted land is vastly easier than a long and spindly and heavy starship - how will they handle that?
> I worry more about spaceX's ability to land starship on the moon.
I'm sure they will land it on the moon multiple times before they put any people on it. (And the other choices like National Team or Dynetics would have done the same.)
What's amazing is that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon with humans on it the first time. And the Space Shuttle had astronauts on-board its maiden flight. People took risks with human spaceflight back then that they don't any more. Computers are so much more advanced now, you don't need astronauts to fly things. Even the Space Shuttle, technically could have been fully automated, but NASA had a culture of wanting to put a human in control. And a few deadly disasters have changed the attitude around risking astronauts’ lives to become more risk-averse.
Yes, Apollo 11 had humans on the first actual landing but they previous Apollo missions included "dress rehearsal" flights that did almost everything but touch down. It was not just launch and land the first time with people. Incremental steps along the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10
There were actually theories that Moon might be covered in fine dust heavy landers might just sink in, so one of the objectives was testing that out. And thankfully the theory turned out to be incorrect. :)
Apollo had a pretty strict deadline to minimize the chance USSR would accomplish the goal first. NASA accepted the additional risk of foregoing more unmanned tests after the launch vehicle flew successfully. And the Saturn V was itself tested all-up. The schedule had a much larger weight than than current manned programs.
To be fair, the capability for autonomous computing back in those days was far more constrained, especially given launch lift costs and the mass of computing, so you had to have humans
What you say may well be true for Apollo. But for the Space Shuttle, even from the first mission back in 1981, most of the flying was done by the computers. There were only a few steps which had to be done by humans – one of which was flicking the switch to lower the landing gear. NASA could have fully automated it, but they made a decision not to. Part of the reason was a culture which wanted to keep a human in the loop rather than having everything under computer control.
It was only after the Columbia disaster that they actually enhanced the Shuttle to enable it to be fully autonomous and perform landing and re-entry without a crew. If the Shuttle was damaged and re-entry was too risky, then the crew would shelter in the ISS and the Shuttle would attempt to re-enter and land without the crew onboard – best case scenario, the Shuttle lands intact; worse case, it breaks up on re-entry while the crew remain safely behind on the ISS. They never had to use this autonomous re-entry/landing capability, however.
Sorry for not providing a link to the document giving the procedure for automated shuttle contingency operation. IIRC, there was no plan to de-orbit and land the orbiter. The plan was to ease it away from ISS, open the cargo bay doors, execute the de-orbit burn, and orient the vehicle to break up and burn as completely as possible. Of course, the digital autopilot was capable of performing an automated landing. It was always done manually, ostensibly to maintain pilot proficiency and minimize the reaction time should the autopilot misbehave.
> Sorry for not providing a link to the document giving the procedure for automated shuttle contingency operation. IIRC, there was no plan to de-orbit and land the orbiter. The plan was to ease it away from ISS, open the cargo bay doors, execute the de-orbit burn, and orient the vehicle to break up and burn as completely as possible.
The plan to intentionally trigger the orbiter to break-up on re-entry was really only for STS-114 – that was the first post-Columbia mission, but RCO and IFM cable weren't available yet. From the next mission, STS-121 onwards, the IFM cable was stored on-board the ISS, so the plan was to use RCO to re-enter and land under remote control. (I'm not sure what the plan was for STS-125, which I believe is the only post-Columbia non-ISS mission – they couldn't use the IFM on the ISS since it wasn't reachable from their orbit; I don't know if NASA had a second IFM cable to use for it.)
I worry more about spaceX's ability to land starship on the moon. Not because they won't get it right eventually in texas, but the moon isn't smooth. I know they will have a plan to deal with that, but getting a few ton lander with 4 legs to not tip over and handle tilted land is vastly easier than a long and spindly and heavy starship - how will they handle that?