Agreed. I'm so nervous, this seems high risk.

For some context they certified the Dragan capsule with a LOC (loss of crew) rating of 1 in 270, which is more than double what the shuttle had (IIRC it ranged from 1 in 10 for the first shuttle flight to 1 in 90 towards the end of the career)

Mmm. Was that risk evaluation in house?

I hope for the best too

High risk relative to?

Not launching your ass into space on a giant rocket?

Thank you for a delightfully clear explanation.

It's the first manned launch on the Dragon platform. There have been a number of unmanned launches and tests, but no where near as many as on Soyuz.

A quick search through Wikipedia shows 140+ manned Soyuz launches, and around 20 total for the SpaceX Dragon.

Note those numbers are for the spacecraft, not the booster (the Soyuz platform has both the spacecraft and booster named Soyuz, SpaceX has the Dragon spacecraft on the Falcon 9 booster).

This is the Dragon 2, it has flown twice, once to the Station and back. A second time where the rocket was blown up to test the in-flight abort system.

It is pretty different from the 20 Dragons used on CRS.

True. I looked around for an explanation on what changed, and couldn't find anything super specific.

I expect a decent number of systems were reused or modified, rather than being fully original

Exactly. The odds are not what I'd like them to be.

While I agree the risks are higher than Soyuz, there has to be an acceptable risk threshold, in order to build the safety record of a new platform.

Both the Saturn 5 and Space Shuttle had far fewer unmanned launches than Dragon, before the first manned flight. The Soyuz booster started as an ICBM, and thus has a harder to compare track record. Here's a graphic for the booster family historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_R-7_launches

So, never flying on new vehicle or flying a vehicle uncrewed for 40 years is the only option you consider save?

That seems like incredible pessimism to me.

Maybe somewhere between those two extremes.

Relative to staying on the ground, at the very least