How Does The Dragon Space Capsule Differ From the Apollo?

Factual Questions
1

I saw the clip on YouTube, and it looks to me, that the Dragon looks a lot like the 1960’s Apollo.
However, it costs a lot less. How is this possible?
Is the Dragon design a much less complex design? If it will be 100% private financed, it will have to be a lot less complex (althogh the technical advances of the last 40 years must have lowered the costs quite a bit.
At any rate, how do most experts rate the Dragon-is it safe and robust?

2

A few links might be worthwhile:

SpaceX’s page for the Dragon:
http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php

Dragon data sheet (PDF): http://www.spacex.com/downloads/dragonlab-datasheet.pdf

Seriously? While certainly an amazing engineering triumph of its time, the Apollo capsule is now 40-year-old technology. And, compared to even Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo, it was very simple. Advances in computers, electronics, and materials sciences have been enormous over the past 40 years.

3

I think the OP is wrong about the cost as well.

4

I’m not sure the comparison is really apt. SpaceShipTwo is its own launch system, if you take the Dragon plus is launch system, its considerably more complex then just the capsule. And of course, the Dragon is meant for docking and orbital flight, SpaceShipTwo just goes up and comes back down again.

5

Actually, the comparison I was making was that even SpaceShipTwo (which, as you note, has a far simpler mission profile than either an Apollo capsule or a Dragon capsule) is still probably a far more complex spacecraft than the Apollo capsule was.

6

Probably so, especially given that, despite the fact that the Dragon is the product of a private company, the development of it has been done under several different NASA contracts (and, according to the Wikipedia article on the Dragon, the contracts total several billion dollars).

7

I’m interested in the Dragon capsule’s abalative heat shield. It appears to be a continuous sheet of material.
In the Apollo capsule, the heat shield was a honeycomb styructure, with the cells filled with a resin type material-building them was a very slow process 9thye filling was done by hand).
In any event, if successful in tests, when will the first manned Dragon flight take place?