Hacker News Reader

The Space Shuttle suffered 2 total losses in 135 missions. Apollo had 1 total loss from a dozen or so flights (plus several heart-stopping near misses). If privately flown Cessna 172s had that kind of fatality rate, I (and many other posters on this board) would long since be a smoking hole in the ground.

Space flight is spectacularly dangerous, and US launch vehicles have a particularly gnarly safety record. Some paranoia is probably warranted.

The space shuttle, Apollo and early Soyuz were also very different spacecraft than current designs and technology.

Challenger and Columbia were lost due to institutional ineptitude. The engineers that were the manufacturer of the SRBs on Challenger specifically warned against the cold temperatures and were overruled. People noticed the foam shedding issue with the space shuttle many years before the Columbia incident. The space shuttle was a catastrophic clusterfuck of a pork barrel political design. There was actually no launch escape system or possibility of recovery from early launch phase anomaly once the SRBs were lit, until they burned out (unlike the launch escape system on Soyuz, Apollo, Dragon2, etc).

The space shuttle had a ridiculous number of moving parts and degree of complexity compared to a Dragon2 on a Falcon9 (or a Soyuz on top of its booster)

The soviet union and russia have had zero fatalities since Soyuz 11 in 1971. I would actually venture that at this point it might be statistically safer to fly along as a passenger in a modern Soyuz mission than to fly as a second passenger in some sub-500-hour pilot's kitbuilt piper cub clone.

Granted that current Soyuz is the most reliable human-carrying spacecraft today (not that there's much competition). And granted that the Shuttle was deeply weird and a bad idea.

But Wikipedia tells me that the next Soyuz to go up will be #142, counting from Gagarin. In the hypothetical world where (say) the Mir crisis had been fatal, Soyuz would have a lifetime success rate almost exactly the same as the Shuttle's.

Even if the new ones are much better, we don't have the statistical power to say. Gimme the kitbuilt Piper any day.

Considering the Soyuz-U has over 700 launches and the R7 family has over 1000 (of which all Suyuz launch vehicles are part), only taking the manned versions is a somewhat distorted comparison (though not unfavorable in some aspects).

The Soyuz-success/failure manned rate is about the same as the space shuttle, though a bit higher but with successful escapes and launch aborts. If you start comparing casualties the space shuttle loses massively as only 4 cosmonauts have died, all in the decent stage (either crashed or died on entry) with the R7 and derivatives as launch vehicles and Suyuz or Voskhod as name.

To be fair, the total of the R7 family (which is skewed since there are way more failures in the early days than after the 1990's for all kinds of rockets) is 137 vs 1755 or about 7 % vs the 1.5% of the space shuttle.

I'd be curious to see some actual numbers here...

I ride motorcycles, and am personally fully aware of the fact that this mode of transport makes me to a first approximation 10 times as likely to die on the road compared to driving a car, and I'm happy to accept that risk for myself.

(Probably because I have enough hubris to believe I can make a significant difference there by being more skillful and less reckless than all those _other_ motorcycle riders - which I believe psychologists refer to as "illusory superiority"...)

> If human spaceflight had the same number of annual fatalities as the current number deaths in the US 48 states while flying homebuilt/kit/light sport aircraft, both NASA and the news media would be freaking out.

What a nonsensical statement. If light sport aircraft had as many fatalities as the current number of deaths in the US 48 states while driving/walking/biking, both the FAA and the news media would be freaking out.

And, as pointed out, spaceflight is actually significantly more dangerous than light sport aircraft, so I'm not so sure that the "standard of safety [...] seems to be much, much higher than the FAA's."

It's supposed to be a nonsensical statement: I guess what I was trying to say is that we have come to culturally "accept" a certain number of fatalities each year in commonplace activities, like walking down the street, using a bathtub, driving a car, etc.

These are not remarked upon outside of local news. Three people die in an experimental category airplane crash, makes the local news. If three people were to die in a spacecraft accident, national media would freak the fuck out.

> we have come to culturally "accept" a certain number of fatalities each year in commonplace activities, like walking down the street, using a bathtub, driving a car, etc.

I disagree; there are ongoing, successful efforts to make driving, walking down the street (see Vision Zero for example), and many more activities safer. We haven't accepted the risk levels at all.

> I disagree; there are ongoing, successful efforts to make driving, walking down the street (see Vision Zero for example), and many more activities safer. We haven't accepted the risk levels at all.

But the existence of awareness campaigns proves the point: Someone has to connect the dots on the statistics and then advocate to get people to care. Nobody needs to advocate for more coverage of spacefaring fatalities.

> awareness campaigns

These aren't campaigns to build awareness, but to change laws, training, etc.

> Someone has to connect the dots on the statistics and then advocate to get people to care

People need to know about something in order to care about it. I'm not sure what that means.

> Nobody needs to advocate for more coverage of spacefaring fatalities.

Right; those are sensational and get lots of coverage.

I think the FAA is more concerned with 500+ people on a high-explosive ballistic missile we call a 777 than they are the one or two people on a plane they built themselves. I'm not sure how you begin to compare the two.

I'm not comparing the two. I'm comparing 4-seat spacecraft to 4-seat aircraft in the kitbuilt/homebuilt/experimental licensed/light sport category.