Comment by tavavex

SpaceX has flown 18 crewed launches on a single type of vehicle, all in the 2020s, all of them either doing an ISS run or an orbital launch. NASA has had over 200 manned launches spanning well over half a century, flown on all sorts of tech, with vastly different designs, kinds of engineering culture, mission profiles. They were the organization that did first-of-its-kind missions. You just bringing up two numbers makes it seem like the companies existed at the same time and were essentially equals, and not like there's a historical innovator that spilled some blood while pushing the limits and a modern private business that made some innovations but is still treading on ground that's so well-known because of all the experience and knowledge we already gathered from those past risky ventures.