Re: I don't get the delay....
Apollo astronauts used a mixture of courage and ignorance of the danger to get to the moon. If they had known then how dangerous their rockets really were - they would probably still have gone but would have used a larger supply of courage.
Commercial crew has to make do with much less ignorance and hardly any courage. To make up for it, Boeing is now far more skilled at fleecing NASA. Among other things, Musk wanted this project to fund development of retro propulsive landings. As everybody knows it is completely impossible to land a rocket by flying backwards with the engines burning at minimum thrust NASA stomped on that plan and effectively forced him to use parachutes. Musk has this strange concept of proving parachutes (don't) work by tying them to a lump of concrete and throwing them out of a helicopter instead of using the standard formulae for parachute design. This insane choice has caused delays because it turns out reality does not obey the standard formulae for parachute design.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
