Originally Posted by
tdracer
The Saturn V has the rather unique claim that it never experienced a failure that prevented the payload from reaching earth orbit. No other US launch system with more than 10 launches can make that claim.
What Musk and company is doing is much closer to what the US did with the Atlas - launch one, see what fails, fix it and try again. Similar to Starship, Atlas's were mass-produced (I think total production was over a thousand).
Even after the Atlas was man-rated for the Mercury program, the failure rate was not low - around 25% - NASA was somewhat fortunate that four manned Mercury-Atlas launches were successful.
Obviously Starship will need to get far better reliability than that before they can think of man-rating it.