alt Hacker NewsDid 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.
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.